By turns bawdy and bold, Russell shifts between precise, accurate scientific description and sheer absurdity, which renders...
Struck by catastrophes like a fatal supervirus, 23rd-century Earth has become a world of peaceful, nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes living harmoniously in nature alongside telepathic animal clones resuscitated from the Pleistocene era, until an invention created by an unlikely alliance alters the future.
Connected by a solar-powered Internet, guided by a philosophy called "The Return," humanity enjoys “the best of times, the best of worlds,” as teacher Clare says to Brad, a mathematical genius whose job is to monitor and repair solar computer technology. Clare comes to Brad’s lab to guide him through a spirit-quest that will turn into a world-altering journey. Toying with many origin stories, Russell (Teresa of the New World, 2015, etc.) ties physics to basket-weaving, biology to holography in a convoluted tale riddled with contradiction: if humanity believes in panpsychism, in which all life (including plants) enjoys a consciousness that “is everywhere and in everything” (or TOE, as Brad calls it: the theory of everything), why do people hunt? Even the novel itself asks “how could you hunt someone you could talk to?” and yet Clare has just killed a telepathic saber-toothed cat, albeit in self-defense. And why does telepathy also have “syntax and meaning” when it isn’t a language? Brad, Clare, a bi-gendered hermit named Luke/Lucia, and his/her beloved mutant direwolf, Dog, form an unlikely alliance; after Dog is killed, Brad and Dog’s consciousness (lodged in Luke/Lucia’s cerebellum) discover the key to immortality together, learning how to switch on dead DNA to holographically resurrect not just Dog, but “squirrels, bears, horses, mammoths, mice, deer, camels,” and Clare’s deceased child. But when immortality becomes a possibility, a dangerous rift opens up between the tribes and the immortals, sending Luke/Lucia, Dog, Clare, Brad, and their children into exile.
By turns bawdy and bold, Russell shifts between precise, accurate scientific description and sheer absurdity, which renders this ambitious tale of human hubris quite uneven and eventually implausible.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63158-068-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yucca Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
This is a thought-provoking debut, and Giddings is a young writer to watch.
A first-time novelist offers medical horror with a political edge.
Lena Johnson’s grandmother has just died, leaving behind a staggering amount of debt. Lena’s mother is debilitated by an illness—or collection of illnesses—no one can diagnose or cure. When Lena is offered a position that pays an incredible sum of money and full health-insurance coverage for her mom, she feels that she has no choice but to leave college and become a research subject in a secret government project. Her participation requires her to lie to family and friends about what she’s doing, and she signs a nondisclosure agreement that discourages her from ever revealing the torture she and other people of color will endure at the hands of white doctors. The historical underpinnings of Giddings’ premise are obvious. Lena follows in the footsteps of black men whose syphilis went untreated even though they were promised health care for joining the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and her experience echoes that of the enslaved women James Marion Sims brutalized while testing new gynecological techniques. It might seem that, unlike them, Lena has a choice, but does she? The position she finds herself in after her grandmother’s death is a reminder that hundreds of years of structural racism have made it difficult for black families to accumulate and pass on wealth. But this novel isn’t just about Lena’s physical ordeal. The emotional and mental strains of being black in an environment seemingly designed to punish blackness—and the necessity to pretend that everything is fine—are devastating, too. At the novel’s beginning, Lena is in the habit of noting when a person she’s describing is white, a powerful rejoinder to the widespread tendency to consider whiteness the default American identity. Toward the end, she has to consciously remind herself that she is still human. In terms of style and storytelling, Giddings doesn’t always succeed, but there’s no denying the potency of her message.
This is a thought-provoking debut, and Giddings is a young writer to watch.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291319-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.
A harrowing and fully imagined vision of dystopian America from Lee, who heretofore has worked in a more realist mode.
Lee’s oeuvre is largely made up of novels about Asians assimilating into American society (The Surrendered, 2010, etc.), and in many regards, this one is no different. Its hero is Fan, a young woman of Chinese descent who leaves her native Baltimore to find her disappeared lover, Reg. However, the near-future America she travels through is catastrophically going off the rails: The wealthy (or “Charters”) live in protected communities, the lawless “counties” are highly dangerous, while those like Fan in the struggling middle live and work in highly regimented communities designed to serve the Charters’ needs. (Fan worked in a fishery in Baltimore, renamed B-Mor.) Typical of dystopian literary novels, the circumstances that brought the country to this ugly pass aren’t clear (though social concerns about the environment and carcinogens are high). What Lee adds to the genre is his graceful, observant writing, as well as a remarkably well-thought-out sense of how crisis stratifies society and collapses morality. As Fan travels north from B-Mor, she encounters or hears about people who are actively brokering or sacrificing human life to survive. Lee’s imagination here is at once gruesome and persuasive: A family of circus-type performers who kill people and feed them to their dogs, a cloistered Charter housewife with a group of adopted children who are never allowed to leave their rooms, a doctor who accepts poor patients only to the extent they’re willing to prostitute themselves to him. The potency and strangeness of these characters never diminish the sense that Lee has written an allegory of our current predicaments, and the narration, written in the collective voice of B-Mor, gives the novel the tone of a timeless and cautionary fable.
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-610-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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