Review of The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea

Author: Ray Nayler

Publisher: Picador

Date of Publication: May 30, 2023

 

                  A few specifics first: this story involves octopuses, creepy corporate bosses and henchmen, and pirate ships. Now a little more meta. People sometimes incline to notice the bizarre and miss the obvious. The Mountain in the Sea takes this idea and applies it to our current social structures and belief in what we know. It points out how we willfully fail to learn much of what is readily apparent and most critical, how any growth can become cancerous, and how people can withdraw so deep into themselves that they lose track of their actual center. Don’t give up! Just like my review, this story just takes a little bit of time and attention to get truly interesting.

                  The world in the book exists vaguely as it does today. Nations govern. Technology corporations increasingly blur the lines between business and government. People fight to save the planet and to kill each other, depending on the day and place. In this quasi-modern era, the massive tech company DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. A small team forms around the mission of studying them: marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent half her life researching cephalopod intelligence; a battle-scarred security agent; and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. Their efforts are complicated by forces larger than DIANIMA attempting to seize the octopuses for themselves.

                  The concepts that inspire Nayler’s worldbuilding are well tailored to the story he tells. As technology leads to the development of more specialized jobs, new tech is as likely to be used for abuse as for enrichment. There is the feeling that both governments and non-governmental international organizations are either dictatorial or on the verge of losing control, and that people’s control over their own lives grows scarcer as well. Threats to survival grow even as resources diminish. These concepts, rooted in contemporary social experience, provide a solid departure point for Nayler’s advancement beyond our current inventions and discoveries. Where the story threatens to overburden itself is Nayler’s messy worldbuilding. The first portion of the book is filled with a number of novel technological creations, fictional corporations and their unnamed actors, and the required character development. The amount of novel items and social organization without sufficient elucidation is distracting. Excessive worldbuilding is sometimes paired with over explanation of Nayler’s characters. The characters are thought exercises as much as people – a quality I personally enjoyed – but the more a character is a vehicle, the less it is a person. Nayler’s alternating between the perspectives of several characters can also complicate how he uses those characters. They often feel more separated than connected due to the extreme variations between who they are and the circumstances that challenge them. As the story focuses more directly on the complicated thought processes of those characters, it clarifies in both its primary points of interest and its emotional heft. However, that focus on experience rather than place needs to occur a little sooner. I was most captivated by this book when I could picture the forehead wrinkles of a scientist frustrated by the impotence of her knowledge, or when I could feel the sadness of a person stuck in a place where they don’t belong. That re-connected me with the story. The problem was I often needed re-connecting because the writing had interrupted my connection.                   

For all of my gripes about the distractions of this book, there were some key elements that I liked. I look for books that make me both think and feel. Nayler inverted the typical linkage of those two things: The Mountain in the Sea made me feel because I was thinking, and not the other way around. I loved the choice to manifest our ignorance in the form of the endangered, knowledgeable octopuses, and the fact that the various actors in the book went to extremes to seize, understand, and use those octopuses. The ending is left entirely open, and that becomes surprisingly satisfying once the dilemmas and mental processes of the characters become the true focal point. I would suggest that readers regard this book as an otherworldly thought exercise to get the most out of their reading experience.

Review of Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

Author: Anthony Doerr

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: September 2021

I am still catching my breath, emerging from this story. So my beginning offering is a collection of thoughts, harvested from my reading experience.

For the last 200 pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land, I felt as if I was preparing to fall. The story builds upon itself like a great tsunami, each word sucking me in reverse up to the crest of the wave.

We use the word “amateur” to refer to someone who is yet a fool in the field in which they play. Amateur has spiraled out from the Latin “amator,” lover, from “amare,” to love. To be a fool is to love is to do as we should and as we often must.

To know one thing is to be aware of ten other unknowns. Knowledge is power and knowledge is fear, and that is a dangerous combination.

To tell stories is not just a diversion, or a game, or a conjuring from rarefied air. Stories are survival, repeated survival. All of them, real or imagined, are underpinned by a hope that something formed through the words will capture and lift and submerge the reader in a whirl and depth of feeling that they have not yet experienced and may not yet comprehend. Maybe from that lack of solid knowledge, an amator will emerge, look onto the world anew.

And now, for the characters.

In the fifteenth century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book – the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.

In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.

And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of paper the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.

They are grappling with adulthood in worlds in peril, and they find resilience, hope, and an improbable, improbably preserved story.

To create a character is an intimidating task. To create five different main characters, each with their own separate stories, is difficult on yet another improbable level. Like all the best storytellers, Doerr has a level of mastery that lets the reader disregard the effort and fully inhabit the tale. Each adventure, each setting, each nuance of those five characters, is so transfixingly tangible that they are near impossible to forget even over the course of 574 pages. The book does not feel burdened by the weight of the numerous times, tales, and emotions it recounts. Instead, it feels oddly, definitively, complete. The compendium of the characters’ collective lives creates a mounting sense of need to read the book, not simply to get to the end, but because the characters are quite literally the past, present, and future: Constantinople, modern-day Idaho, and interstellar odyssey. They are not always pretty people. They are always changing, and always seeking constants that will help them abide and preserve the places that make them. But they grow, and they hurt, and they love, and they come to feel so familiar that I grieved parting from them.

That delicious grief owes to Doerr’s gift for the linguistic mechanics of storytelling, allowing a collection of words to become a single current, one that carries and coheres. Each sentence is an artful, thoughtful construction that urges the reading of the next. Each paragraph or section within a chapter is a story in miniature. He leaves no detail up to chance, be it the weight that a name holds, the feeling a sound instills, the motion in a particular moment. The imagination of the book is directed by Doerr’s words instead of being contained by them. The links that ultimately appear between the stories his words create are firm enough to solidify the similarities between his characters’ trials, but light enough to let those stories exist independently as well. In that way, the shape and fluidity of the words compares to the structure of the book itself.

To those who enjoy fantasy, history, intrigue, and a dynamic invention, this book is for you. To the poets, the curious, the ones who feel everything frighteningly deeply, the existential thinkers, the adventurous, and the bold, this is for you as well. Please. Dig in.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Road

 The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: September 2006

McCarthy gives his readers hell. Literally. America is burned and pillaged. Roads lie caked in ash and corpses. Dying trees burn on a vast, hopeless altar to an absent god. Cities are pinnacles of fear rather than civilization. And – if they want to survive – people themselves see others as the last incarnate form of evil. In this wasteland, a man walks with his son. Their only goal is to reach the sea, and their only permanent possession is a gun. They survive because surviving is the only purpose they have left.

There does not yet exist a common conception of mass extinction that can match the scale of death The Road. The relationship between the man and his son is the easiest – almost the only – part of the world with which to empathize. The son doesn’t want to disappoint his father by giving up, and the father is incapable of relinquishing his responsibility to protect his son. The boy becomes godlike to his father, a beacon of purity and decency that, even if physically and emotionally sullied, is not yet corrupted by the horrors the pair face. In return, the care and effort that the father invests in both the pair’s survival and their continued humanity enables the father to be a similar figure of goodness to his son. This loop of investment and inspiration gives the pair the sense that they might be “good guys”, that they might yet glean something worthy from destiny, even if that destiny itself is bleak. Even if forsaken, man is not yet purposeless.

McCarthy allows his readers to see easily that the man and the boy find purpose in doing what’s right, despite desperate circumstances. What he doesn’t give away so easily is what to do with that purpose when it seems so utterly futile in a world that’s inexorably dying and unrelentingly destitute and depraved. Such is one of the many questions raised by the book: what is the purpose of seeking and protecting a sense of self when the only accomplishment is another miserable few moments of survival? This question is asked and unanswered. . At the utmost surface level, readers embark on a relatively monotonous journey with a relatively predictable end. The writing itself becomes tiring, lacking punctuation and speech tags, blending the pseudo stream of consciousness narration with description of the bleak surroundings. And yet, hundreds of thousands of readers have chosen to accompany the man and his son on their journey. We want to believe that even if all we knew of society and humanity vanished, purpose, hope, and virtue can survive as long as we do. 

The Road asks readers to consider at what point we are no longer human, and whether there is a point at which we can no longer recover humanity. It is beyond a depressing read. It is disturbing, haunting, and filled with a longing for beauty expressed in arcane language to feel as though that beauty is only a taunting memory. The freedom of the readers is to take on the world of the novel willingly – and be able to leave it for a better one.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Overstory

The Overstory

Author: Richard Powers

Publication Date: April 2018

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

          Monuments are traditionally created for that which is past. The Overstory is a monument to that which currently surrounds us – sentience, in thousands upon thousands of forms. This is a novel full of people, but truly peopled by trees. And trees talk a lot. They warn each other about infectious species. They share food. Old trees even help new seedlings grow. This is a novel about how trees survive, and how we fail to learn from them.

          Powers’ story alternates between the viewpoints of nine characters. Each character enters the story with an inclination for detachment, and experiences a life-altering form of fundamentally displacing root shock. There is Adam, the psychology student who knows everything and believes nothing. Nick loses his entire family. Patricia loses her calling and community. Everyone has an identity crisis; everyone, at some point, feels lost, alone, is temporarily blinded by fury or despair. What brings them together is trees, and what forests show them is the necessity and authority of time. 

          Environmental stewardship is immensely challenged. Telling people to behave differently implies that they are behaving wrongly. In The Overstory, by placing human motivations in the context of “tree time,” the concept of the individual breaks down into a sum of largely selfish and unimportant actions. Social hierarchies and material values appear as irrelevant and petty when a tree as old as Christianity is butchered to put money temporarily in pockets. Creating empathy so far removed from our sense of want, immediacy, and personal relevance is difficult. So Powers utilizes the lens of greatest possible empathy – that of his characters. He creates characters that are fundamentally broken, and then heals those characters with the patience, dignity, and generosity of trees. Each person pours themselves into that new form of life they discover in a mutualistic relationship between their own salvation and that of the trees. It is this mutualism that makes the loss of trees devastating, and that enables the weight of each non-human death to impact readers. Ironically, the magic of the characters is that they allow us to empathize not just with their excruciating experience, but also with their ultimate insignificance in comparison to the trees they each come to love.

          Through his storytelling, Powers delivers something more powerful than any polemic manifesto. As much as any activist, Powers illuminates the reciprocities of nature. He is both a romanticist, believing in and striving for harmony, and a student of potential apocalypse, advocating the transformation of human relationships. The effect is more comprehending and resigned than hopeful. He devastates readers into responsibility, into idealism, and into the combination of the two that must exist to save the forests he imbues with a life richer than our own.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Fractal Noise

Fractal Noise

Author: Christopher Paolini

Publication Date: May 2023

Publisher: Tor Books

In a horror movie, trouble always beckons. And the people always follow. 

On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII, the crew of the Adamura discover an anomaly – a hole, to be precise, too perfect to be natural. A mongrel mix of duty, curiosity, and purposelessness drive a small group to land on the planet and journey to the hole on foot. With each step, they are brought closer to the unexplained force of the anomaly, and somehow closer to the lives they forced behind them.

“‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” This quote begins part one, entitled “Apprehension.” The eminence of death renders cowards of us all; the only variance is when and in what form this occurs. For Alex, his fear and apprehension manifest themselves in his enrollment on the Adamura, ironically avoiding the future in a capsule designed for exploration of the unknown. Alex is perhaps likable only for his bitter realism. His grief is a black hole, and the immediacy with which his pain is slammed into the story borders on excess, eased only by the sympathy it earns. 

What begins to redeem Alex is that he is more determined than he recognizes. When a black hole swallows matter, it can spit it out disheveled and decomposed. Alex’s grief pulls him into a black hole. His journey across Talos VII finishes the decomposition. That decomposition is necessary for rejuvenation. Paolini defines Alex’s comrades on the punishing planet by one or two things each – hedonism, indecisiveness, etc. Their motivations barely exceed the nihilist nothing-left-to-lose. Their physical separation from the remainder of the Adamura’s crew removes the remaining stability from their motivation and self-definition. That is where Alex’s willing decomposition becomes a strength.

Aside from the physical and psychological torment of the characters, Paolini’s storyline and writing are clean. His fluid style and his ordering of flashbacks and present events inform readers about the mindsets of the characters and the impact of their backgrounds on their current missions. The ending was a cliffhanger, but fit the nature of the underlying messages and didn’t prevent relishing the rest of the story. And of course, there is the mounting tension that heightens the awe and import of the anomaly for both characters and readers. 

In this particular story from the fractalverse, the universe in which this and Paolini’s To Sleep in a Sea of Stars are set, Paolini physically juxtaposes a reputed paradise with the hell that is being alone in the unknown. He promises readers neither an end to suffering nor an answer to it. He does urge us to seek knowledge and community with each decision we make, and know that the relative impermanence of both should give us the freedom to love them without trying to control them. Your reviewer has been with Paolini since the first of The Inheritance Cycle, and is eager to read more fractalverse stories.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Author: V. E. Schwab

Publication date: October 2020

Publisher: Tor Books

    V. E. Schwab’s Addie LaRue gives readers a girl who sells her soul to keep her life. Addie is trapped in the confines of 18th century French womanhood - in short, being told to be a person she does not wish to be in a place she does not wish to inhabit. When offered the ability to change her circumstances, Addie seizes the bargain. What she does not realize are the terms and conditions; in exchange for immortality, Addie gives up the essential human need to be remembered. Addie is disconnected from the very world in which she is now permanent - until one day, a young man in a bookshop remembers her name.

    Schwab writes with a fluid mix of accessible narration and almost poetic expression. Her writing is so clean and artful that her introduction - a genuine account of a defining time in the author’s life and the origin of Addie’s story - almost seems part of the novel. That style remains consistent throughout the book. Schwab’s attention to detail, in drawing both her characters and the places they inhabit, knits meticulous connections between the timelines she conjoins. She questions the defining boundaries of love with a protagonist who is somehow both permanent and temporary, rendering the feeling as equally limited and timeless. Along the same line, Schwab’s expression of history as a sometimes lucky, sometimes perfectly executed mesh of ideas, enables an exploration of the characteristics that keep us human. The story itself is the capstone of this sometimes whimsical, sometimes weighty concoction. The resilience, creativity, and compassion that Addie develops as a result of her curse are reminders that even when isolated, all people share some measure of suffering, of joy, and of willpower. Romance readers will find a lot in this novel that provokes and unsettles our conceptions of passion and of love. Fantasy readers will enjoy the lovely central conceit of Addie’s existence as a living ghost, granted immortality at the cost of the essential reciprocity of human connection. All readers may find haunting beauty in the author’s exquisitely crafted narrative of Addie’s long, lonely journey to knowing herself and being known.

 - D. K. Nuray

Review of Project Hail Mary

 Project Hail Mary

Author: Andy Weir

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: May 2021

“What is your name?”

He’s Ryland Grace. But we don’t know that yet. And neither does he. He’s millions of miles from home on a “hail mary” mission to save Earth from certain and imminent death. But he doesn’t remember that. All he knows is that he just woke up in a room with dead people and his memory is returning far too slowly. With time running out for our species and himself, Ryland must figure out his mission and accomplish his impossible task - finding the solution to an extinction-level threat. Alone. This is a scenario made for - and of course crafted by - the author, Andy Weir.

Ryland is an entertainer as much as a wellspring of scientific ingenuity. His sharp, often self-deprecating humor keeps him sane and takes some of the edge off of what would otherwise be an overwhelming and seemingly endless series of crises. Ryland’s sense of curiosity is as relentless as his sense of comedy. It’s Ryland’s curiosity - even in the few times that there is not a sense of desperate urgency - that makes all the science and smarts entertaining. Think fun physics experiment instead of math homework. Weir’s small set of Earth-bound characters - who live only in Ryland’s fitfully returning memory - all share a few core personality elements, similar both to each other and to Ryland. They are quick to voice opinions, decisive in their actions, and prone to sarcasm. In other words, they don’t slow plot momentum and they don’t complicate readers’ interaction with Ryland. 

Weir’s literature is not finely nuanced, full of rich tangential descriptions, or weighted with deep insights. His specialty is a crisis-driven, warp-speed plot stuffed with problem-solving science and saturated with his protagonist’s relentless, laugh-out-loud sense of irony and gallows humor. But that’s more than good enough. It’s what Weir did so well in The Martian, perhaps missed a little in Artemis, and delivers again in Project Hail Mary. But this is not just a desperate-clever-guy-alone-in-space story. Without giving anything away, it is worth noting that the sociological, psychological, and xenobiological elements Weir added to Project Hail Mary make it much more than a rehash of The Martian. In the end, it’s a genuine page-turner that will leave readers a little breathless and disappointed only that the story’s over.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Born A Crime

Born A Crime

Author: Trevor Noah

Publisher: One World

Publication Date: November 2016

It can be easy to forget that celebrities had childhoods. Beneath a public persona is, first and foremost, just another person with an accumulation of experiences that, if the icon is honest and we are attentive, we can know and understand. Noah’s stories curated from his South African childhood don’t just solidify him as more than pixels on a screen. They bring his firsthand experiences with issues such as post-apartheid racism, an unresolved feeling of estrangement, and the challenge of making your way in life from a single parent home to readers in a way that makes these elements of Noah’s origins both understandable and, in some cases, even relatable.

It may seem ironic that the writer engages in his own form of segregation, explicitly separating social and historical context from personal content rather than integrating both into a cohesive narrative. It is a gamble, but one that largely works. Noah is able to present each story simply as an account of experiences because he separately prefaces each story with a brief explanation of relevant socioeconomic circumstances. This gives him the freedom to speak relatively lightly about complex material, entertaining his readers with his presentation while providing them with the opportunity to think about the underlying content - if they choose to read and heed it. 

There are limitations to this approach.

        Noah both invites readers extremely close to his personal memories with each story and creates a distancing, instructional effect at the same time. Each approach interrupts the other. A storyteller ultimately is not supposed to give you the ingredients of a story. They’re supposed to give you a mixture of words and perspective, of engagement and entertainment, and even education that together make a gestalt - something more than the sum of its parts. History is part of Noah’s story. Context is part of Noah’s story. One can easily understand why a TV personality whose life focus is entertainment chose to take this a la carte approach, but the cost is a separation of context and history from the personal narrative they shape and inform. For example, you can read the two meaty paragraphs about education in post-World War II Germany and post-apartheid South Africa, or you can skip straight to the - recognizably funny Trevor Noah - chapter title “GO HITLER!” In other words, you can just order dessert and skip the vegetables. Hard to be against that, but also hard to call it a full meal.

As a writer, Noah may be better suited to scripts than memoirs, but Born A Crime is still a thoughtful glimpse through a comedic yet informed narrative into South Africa’s complicated, disappointing, but still hopeful post-apartheid reality.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Dictionary of Lost Words

 The Dictionary of Lost Words

Author: Pip Williams

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: April 2021

Pip Williams has not only given us an entire book full of words, but provoked us into thinking about them too. Words allow us to create common understanding of ideas and perspectives. Yet the choice, application, and even meaning of words can be an intensely personal experience. This rather lovely paradox underpins the setting, plot, and individual character arcs of The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Born in the late 19th century, Esme Nicoll grows up under the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary - literally. Dr. James Murray and several lexicographers, Esme’s “Da” among them, spend their days around a table in their Scriptorium sorting, defining, and approving words brought to them on slips of paper, while Esme entertains herself underneath the table. One day, a slip falls down into her lap and seemed to be missed by no one. She claims it as her own. Forgotten slips become her secret treasures, defining her as the dictionary defines the world around her. As she grows and her role in the Scriptorium is allowed to become one of consequence, it becomes clear that the men of the Dictionary exclude words of women and common folk, thereby invalidating their thoughts and experiences. In the time of suffragette protests and The First World War, Esme’s quiet, self-appointed purpose of protecting disregarded words and memories guides her journey as a woman and a person. Along with the lost words she rescues, Esme must lose, find, and define herself.

Esme’s guarded behavior and suppressed opinions suit the time she is written into. However, her emotions are still understandable and empathetically accessible to her modern audience. Like the women of her time and the words with which she spends her days, Esme is defined by others but also struggling to validate her own sense of meaning. Our relationship with language is a symbiotic one; words are our creation, and we are continually defining them, but they also have the power to influence and shape our perceptions. Esme’s effort to define herself becomes the emotional gravity of the story - which is why the epilogue is ultimately unable to engage and fully satisfy. There is a recurring sense in the story of characters and ideas oddly truncated even as they are developing. Nonetheless, the story and the author’s protagonist are fully engaging conceptions.

Historical fiction writers walk a fine line between conveying enough historical context to accurately enrich a story but not so much that the narrative is overburdened. Williams capably inhabits this historical fiction “Goldilocks zone”, making sure the historical context is all deeply pertinent and personal to her characters. She also navigates the difficult task of increasing the social and political context of her story as the time it takes place in and its characters evolve. This story impresses upon us that the act of defining is itself a paradox - both essential and perpetually subject to change and imperfection. The story itself has that same feeling of both worthiness and imperfection. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a beautifully conceived journey about the reciprocal nature of words - how meaning is something we both define and discover.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Exhalation

Exhalation

Author: Ted Chiang

Publisher: Vintage Books

Publication Date: May 2019

        A parrot admonishes us about the Fermi Paradox. A time machine in a Baghdad bazaar teaches us about acceptance. A mechanical universe comprehends life by the breath. Virtual pets learn - and teach - humanity. Free will is undone by a button. A robot nanny is a failure of conception. Recorded memory reveals the inhumanities of truth. Even parallel universes cannot separate character from choice.

        It might seem difficult to draw connected lines through stories that range from an Arabian folktale to hard science fiction. But consistent themes are readily apparent and deftly unify Exhalation. Each of the nine stories revolve around the power and constraints of perspective, and the limitations and possibilities of choice. Volition and perspective are the common and complementary themes that make Exhalation a collection rather than just an entertaining bunch of stories.

        In fact, Chiang’s ability to cohere seemingly disparate lines of plot and thought and imagination is what makes Exhalation such a worthy read. The diversity of the settings, timelines, characters, and story length showcases the remarkable breadth of Chiang’s imagination. He is a perfectly fine writer, but it is really in the complexity of his imagination and the breadth of his philosophical provocation that he excels. There is an ouroboros quality that pulls us into Chiang’s writing; the journey of a story arc often ends up limning the questions that created the story in the first place. The result is a deepening sense of curiosity. Sometimes it feels like we’re being told a really good story by a really good professor. We don’t even mind that he’s teaching us something.

        It is not incidental that Chiang is a technical writer for the software industry. His job is to explain, in great detail, complicated things. If he errs in Exhalation, it is by occasionally over-explaining the implications of a story, assuming his audience needs conclusions drawn for them in the same way that an audience reading a technical explanation might. But this is a small critique for an expansive collection. If you like science fiction filled with things that go boom in space, Exhalation might not be for you. This is for people who are willing to be prodded as much as they are entertained.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Space Between Worlds

The Space Between Worlds

Author: Micaiah Johnson

Publisher: Del Rey

Publication Date: August 2020

Cara is valuable because she’s good at dying - albeit on other worlds. The secrets to multiverse traveling have been unlocked by a genius scientist, and Cara has a job as a traverser, one of precious few people who walk on alternate Earths. Precious few because no one can visit an alternate world where their counterpart is still alive. And it turns out that Cara is dead almost everywhere else in the multiverse. Plucked from the dirt of the wastelands, Cara’s job gives her a conditional home in the filthy rich Wiley City, a place so apart from the wastelands that it is literally walled-off.  She collects off-world data for Eldridge Institute and flirts shamelessly (and fruitlessly) with her coworker Dell. When one of Cara’s eight remaining alternate world doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, she is plunged into a web of old secrets on a new world. What she finds will link her past and present, putting her in the center of a plot threatening the entire multiverse. 

Firstly, I need to encourage you to stick with this book. It starts with introductions to an overwhelming number of undeveloped characters. Cara is rapidly established as the center of the plot, but the events and places connected to her are revealed similarly to the characters - too many at once. The plot develops and coalesces into a coherent story as tension rises between Cara’s wasteland home and new Wiley City residence. Cara is the Katniss Everdeen of a different dystopian future. She is fiercely determined to survive, but still bound by an ultimate sense of right and wrong. Walking in the space between worlds has made her a part of every place she goes, yet unable to ever completely belong in any of them. 

Johnson writes in a manner that fits the personality of her main character, convincingly building her settings through a lens colored by Cara’s sense of herself and her situation. As such, she is able to subtly convey social and personal observations in a way that does not feel heavy handed. The Space Between Worlds uses a unique and highly compelling main character to expose and build on conflict, and therefore plot. This plot is revealed piecemeal, but is ultimately worth the wait. YA dystopian science fiction and fantasy readers should enjoy Johnson’s complex, engaging protagonist and the worldview gradually constructed from Cara’s perspective.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Strength of Weeds

The Strength of Weeds

Author: M. M. Blyth

Publisher: M. M. Blyth

Publication Date: November 2020

Ivy and Rose Green are inseparable. Ivy, the narrator of the story, is almost ten and Rose is almost seventeen. Sisters of four boys and daughters of a widowed father, their lives in the backwaters of 1930s Louisiana are far from easy. When the local mine is shut down and their family is left in desperate need of money, Rose is faced with a daunting adventure: finding a husband. Unwilling to let her sister approach marriage without her help, Ivy agrees to accompany her out of the bayou and into the next chapter of her life. Leaving home for the first time and heading to the bustling city of New Orleans, the Green sisters find themselves farther from their simple lives than they ever dreamed. Balancing the excitement and joy of exploring a new world with the gravity of their situation, Ivy and Rose grow closer than ever as their time together draws to a close.

Ivy is an apt and engaging narrator. Able to convey both sisters’ awe and emotional turmoil, Ivy chronicles their steps away from childhood as she narrates the experiences they choose and the circumstances forced upon them. Blyth conveys Ivy’s growing independence through conversations with her family, but also her lingering naivete through her enamored perception of her limited world. Rose is both a best friend and a revered guide to her little sister. At sixteen, she has a broader perception of life’s disappointments than Ivy. However, she is still eager to experience everything she can before marriage constrains her. 

Ivy and Rose describe a Louisiana that is both sultry and struggling, conveying a sense of beautiful ruin. The division between rural and urban Louisiana is stark; the culture and glamour of New Orleans enraptures the girls, awakening them to their impoverished upbringing. Ivy’s abject wonderment at everything more than an hour’s walk from home leads her to describe each detail, immersing readers in her perspective. She provides more than sensory immersion; each vignette is expressed with eloquent fervor, charged with Ivy’s sadness, joy, curiosity, or silliness. Her exuberance is conveyed in a manner that enriches her story rather than burdening it. The one problem that arises with heavy description is Ivy’s extensive vocabulary, which seems to belie both her age and upbringing. In the first couple chapters of The Strength of Weeds, Blyth struggles to create a narrator that can both fit her backwater setting and describe it well. However, as she settles into Ivy’s voice, the notional disparity dissipates; Ivy becomes both credible and compelling. Over the course of the story, Ivy illustrates her home with detail, precision, elegance, and youthful energy. I recommend The Strength of Weeds to YA historical fiction readers. In Ivy and Rose, Blyth gives us characters we can understand and appreciate, bringing their own lives closer to our own and inviting us into their perspective, place, and time.   

- D. K. Nuray

Review of To Be Taught, if Fortunate

To Be Taught, if Fortunate

Author: Becky Chambers

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Publication Date: September 2019

Faced with the possibility that her home planet may have forgotten her and her crewmates, Ariadne O’Neill begins to chronicle her extraordinary journey to the planets of a distant sun, in the hopes that someone may still be listening. We all should.

Spaceflight has always been theoretically restricted by our bodies as much as by our technology. We’re designed for one type of atmosphere, one gravity, and one distance from one particular sun. At the beginning of the twenty-second century, these limitations no longer apply. A technique known as somaforming allows astronauts to survive in non-Earth environments using biological supplementations, and extended hibernation allows humans to dramatically slow their aging process during the long journeys to distant stars. Ariadne and her three crewmates aboard the spaceship the Merian are part of a mission to survey exoplanets suspected of harboring life. For them, potentially habitable worlds aren’t just lights in the night sky but the next waypoints on the expanding frontier of human experience. But their journey separates the crew irreparably from home.

It is improbable that To Be Taught, if Fortunate works as a novella. The title is far from catchy, and the basic plot of astronauts visiting distant planets is hardly groundbreaking. And that plot is tremendously freighted with emotional density that might seem better suited to a full-length novel. There are four characters and four planets - each in turn yielding lessons about the limits and exultation of understanding, about the futility of isolation and the vitality of purpose, and about how purpose is born of understanding your existence in greater context. This novella uses the fundamentally alien to root a fundamentally human sense of place and purpose.

Yes, there is a lot in this novella, but it works. And that’s partly because of what Chambers leaves out. Years of exploration and experience spanning four planets transpire over the course of the story, but the narrative device announced in the opening paragraph - the voice of Ariadne distilling the experiences to their most important elements - makes it work. This provides the author with freedom to give readers enough impression of the worlds to understand them, and enough of a glimpse into the characters’ interactions with each world to understand how each of them thinks and feels. We are immersed only in Ariadne’s summarizing perspective - not in the myriad details of each character and world. We get high and low moments, and an understanding of what creates those moments, which is more than enough to grasp the core of each place and personality. 

As the engineer on board the Merian, Ariadne’s job is to keep everything working and to be an extra set of hands. That gives her more opportunity to observe and reflect than her crewmates. Venturing far from the place you call home doesn’t mean you leave the people and ideas you call home. The Merian’s astronauts are each imperfect, but are united - and sustained - by sharing their grief at leaving behind friends and relatives, the joy of discovery, and their driving sense of wonder. The four are a reminder that even when we are far from familiar settings, it is possible to find home with ideas and people that fulfill us.

       The fact that this reviewer feels compelled to write so much about a novella might be her biggest endorsement. In short, read it. There are plenty of elements to notice and absorb in Chambers’ novella, but most important it is a well-told, enthralling, and thoughtful story. At its best, science fiction broadens our perspective, taking us outward so that we can better see inward - which is exactly what To Be Taught, if Fortunate does. I would recommend it to YA and adult readers who enjoy reflective science fiction.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Bubble (USA & Canada)/The Bubble Boy (UK)

Bubble/The Bubble Boy

Author: Stewart Foster

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Publication Date: May 2017

    Orphaned 11-year old Joe has never known a life outside his hospital room. Joe is reconciled to staying inside, where his unusually weak immune system can’t be attacked. His sole companions are his older sister, Beth, doctors and nurses, and his distant friend Henry who shares his condition. Then one day, a new person enters Joe’s world. Amir is Joe’s new nurse. He talks fast, believes in aliens, and sometimes prefers staring out the window to social interaction. Amir enlarges Joe’s world and becomes his closest friend.

    Joe clearly has an unusual life, but what makes his story special is the ordinary - his interactions with the people who come in and out of his room, his love of Spider-Man, and pleasures as simple as seeing the face of a friend. For a kid who thrives on superhero movies and limited social interaction, Joe is surprisingly thoughtful. While his disease is physically confining, he still has mental freedom. His conversations with nurses, his sister, and Henry show Joe’s curiosity about the world and the people in it and his eagerness to interact with both as much as possible. He has learned to observe, understand, and interpret his small world, and to dream beyond it, to let the imaginative space in his head be an escape.

    Bubble is a chronicle of Joe’s life - the surprises, sorrows, and dreams that can be born and borne in one small room and one young mind. I recommend Bubble to middle grade readers who enjoy realistic fiction that relies on the small intimacies of characters rather than grand adventures to tell a story. 

- D. K. Nuray