lightreads

Europe in Autumn

3/5. In a post EU-collapse Europe, an Estonian chef is recruited into a shadowy currier organization whose expertise is moving things and people across Europe’s ever-shifting borders.

This book got a huge amount of praise when it first came out, and honestly, for the first 2/3 of it, I really didn’t get it? I mean, it was fine, but also slow and pretty aimless. And I particularly didn’t get why so many scifi fans were into this and classified it as one of theirs. I mean, yeah, it had throwaway references to near future technology, and there’s the political speculation, but otherwise it was just a string of spy vignettes.

And then the genre jerked sharply to the left around the 83% mark. I sensed something coming, but totally did not guess what, until it landed and I said “oh! Why didn’t you say that 150 pages ago!”

So. It’s a book about borders. And securing them. And slipping through them. And drawing them and redrawing them and the contours they carve into the societies that straddle them. It’s really quite interesting, in retrospect, and excellent setup for a series. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to audio of that series, so I’m left with a book that didn’t get to the fucking point until the very end and then wandered off leaving me unsatisfied.