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An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
4/5. Aster was born into the slave class on a generation ship centuries into its flight. She is the closest thing her people have to a doctor, and on the spectrum, and she is trying to figure out what her dead mother knew about the ship and its secrets.
This didn't punch me quite as hard as it did many of my friends, but I think that's because I was holding myself carefully back from all the ways this book could hurt me. I got some potentially shatteringly bad news while already halfway through this book, so I simultaneously couldn't take it and also desperately wanted to know what would happen. So I wrapped myself metaphorically in cotton and didn't let this book at where I live. Which it was unerringly aimed at, to be clear.
This book is at its brutal best with its people. One of the secondary characters, whose mental illness is profound and infuriating and maddening and evocative of great tenderness will stay with me for a long time. And the delicacy of the relationship – a little romantic, but that seems too small a word – between the neuroatypical protagonist and a genderqueer person was beautiful. I think this book was less successful in its science fictional elements, and the ending in particular answered some of the practical who-what-where questions, but really none of the more profound questions. So frustrating.
But yes. This is great, and I really want to read Solomon's fourth book, or fifth, or sixth. That one is going to be somewhere unfathomably further along the greatness curve and it is going to knock my socks off.
Content notes: Slavery, brutality of all kinds, medical procedures.
4/5. Aster was born into the slave class on a generation ship centuries into its flight. She is the closest thing her people have to a doctor, and on the spectrum, and she is trying to figure out what her dead mother knew about the ship and its secrets.
This didn't punch me quite as hard as it did many of my friends, but I think that's because I was holding myself carefully back from all the ways this book could hurt me. I got some potentially shatteringly bad news while already halfway through this book, so I simultaneously couldn't take it and also desperately wanted to know what would happen. So I wrapped myself metaphorically in cotton and didn't let this book at where I live. Which it was unerringly aimed at, to be clear.
This book is at its brutal best with its people. One of the secondary characters, whose mental illness is profound and infuriating and maddening and evocative of great tenderness will stay with me for a long time. And the delicacy of the relationship – a little romantic, but that seems too small a word – between the neuroatypical protagonist and a genderqueer person was beautiful. I think this book was less successful in its science fictional elements, and the ending in particular answered some of the practical who-what-where questions, but really none of the more profound questions. So frustrating.
But yes. This is great, and I really want to read Solomon's fourth book, or fifth, or sixth. That one is going to be somewhere unfathomably further along the greatness curve and it is going to knock my socks off.
Content notes: Slavery, brutality of all kinds, medical procedures.