Rivers SolomonRecensioni

DNF @ 45%

This story is a lot. A lot of jumping around, a lot of telling not showing, a lot of things happening that aren't explained.

I'm starting to space out while listening so I'm letting it go.

So this was a bit unusual read for me. First part really interested me, it was different. Second part still went on strong as we get things revealed, but then the last part was kinda eh. Maybe a bit too chaotic, too experimental? It certainly gave me some things to think about thought. 3,5

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

An unusual and potentially original take on the idea of merfolk and their creation. A little confusing and disjointed at times but thought provoking. It did drag occasionally and failed to grip my interest enough for me to love it.

It was a really original premise, but for me the book was just ok. I realize that this requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, and usually that doesn't pose a problem for me with sci-fi and fantasy, but my brain just required too much explanation that wasn't there. (It doesn't help that my degree is marine biology, so I just kept trying to nitpick things, which just pulled me out of the story too much.) There are tons of people who will probably enjoy this a lot, but it just wasn't there for me.

Holy sh*t! THE PREMISE!
I can't wait to get this....

audio fiction, mermaids/merpeople descended from African enslaved women who had been tossed overboard (4 hours)

a Memory Keeper flees from her people when it becomes too much for her to continue remembering their history alone, the generational trauma so great that she almost dies from the pain-filled despair. The story is based on a song with multiple creators, itself based on the musical lore surrounding the Drexia..

March 2024 bingo challenge: Audie Award (Winner – Science Fiction – 2021)

[I'd give a content warning for this book, but tbh it would be longer than the review.]

I finished this a few days ago. I feel like I should have some smart thoughts about it, but I don't really, other than I thought it was very well done! It reminded me of Hunger Games for some reason, except the worldbuilding actually makes sense. What if I compared the two? (Though I have only read the books once, when they first came out, and not watched the movie, so I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.)

- Hunger Games centers on a media empire that keeps the privileged from understanding the humanity of people outside their bubble. Unkindness of Ghosts makes it clear that the media for the privileged that spins perspectives on events exists, but it's not a central preoccupation because lowdeckers aren't a target audience and mostly don't have access to it. I liked the mentions of underground media networks (newsletters, pirate radio) tha lowdeckers have invented, though it's not a focus of the story.

- Hunger Games, like a lot of other dystopian fiction, has people arbitrarily divided into classes with different jobs. Which, you know, is not completely incorrect as an assessment of our world. But it makes a lot more sense on a self-contained generation ship! The thing that really brings life to this tired-ass concept in Unkindness is:

1) real development of different cultures and languages between decks, which is one of my favorite sci fi tropes. I did wonder how many people are supposed to be on the Miranda---thousands is too small for this development, but could it be over a million with the architecture of the ship as explained? Different gender systems on different decks was a really lovely and interesting idea, but there's so much else going on that gender fuckery and queerness ends up being a background to everything else.

2) extensive exploration of how and when people move between decks. There's Aster, Theo, and the mid-deck medic in their roles tending to the different ailments of different classes. There's the chapter about Melusine forced into the 'mammy' role on a high deck. There's Aster and Theo as products of inter-deck relationships, and passing for different classes. There's passes and guards and confrontations even when you have the right pass, and wearing the right (or usually, wrong) clothes to blend in.

- Hunger Games explores trauma and PTSD. Unkindness does that, and also main characters living with neuroatypicality and chronic mental illness.

- Hunger Games is usually not explicit about race, and it's clumsy and binary black-and-white when it is. (Although I still think Katniss was subtextually nonwhite, but what do I know.) Unkindness is very, very explicit about race and racism and being mixed and passing and beauty standards and everything else.

- Both are about the mechanics and ugliness and violence of revolution. I don't remember enough about Hunger Games to comment further. Aster and others resisting in ways they know aren't, logically, a good idea because they're human beings reacting to violent oppression feels... yeah.

- Unkindness: queer queer lesbian queer gender nonconformity queer intersex queer alternate gender systems trans queer medical transition genderqueer queer queer queer aaaaaaa so good thank you

On a technical level, having almost the entire book from Aster's perspective except literally a handful of chapters from other characters exploring other views you wouldn't otherwise be able to see is... understandable, but clunky. I don't know if Solomon is done with this world, but I'd read more, and I'm excited to see what they write next.

This book is kind of wild, I've never read anything like it before. I got very lost a few times but I followed along for the most part. Also read the Afterword, it changes the perspective of the book and I just think it's really cool

I wish I even knew where to start.

This truly is one of the most uniquely beautiful and impactful nooks I have ever read. I am already excited to read it again in the future.

***Content Warning***
So very much that I can't even remember it all, so I would seriously recommend looking it up if you have triggers, but there's a lot of bigotry, included slurs and violence, self harm, suicide, execution, harm and death of a child, sexual assault, and other things I'm forgetting. It's very, very heavy and potentially hugely triggering.

All I can say is that this is exquisite torture, bleak beauty, humanity at it's most raw and imperfect, and laced with hope and characters that represent many of us who have never seen ourselves in stories.

I am a Queer, disabled, trans, neurodivergent person with autism and ADHD, although I am not Black and cannot speak to that experience and the slavery, racism and generational trauma portrayed through the generation ship, Matilda, that is the setting of this story. What I can can speak on is the importance of representation and just how it felt seeing elements of myself reflected in these characters. It's never explicitly said, but Aster is clearly very autistic, which is portrayed wonderfully. Giselle struggles greatly with her mental health, which she owns and has a self acceptance and self worth I truly a dire, while also being an incredibly flawed and spiteful character. There are a number of Queer and trans characters throughout the main cast and side characters with their unique experiences and difficulties explored.

"Maybe Matilda was a girl once. Maybe she froze to death in the vacuum of space and they hollowed her out and put stuff inside her, and that was why she was so cold. A giant empty girl alone in the heavens with only tiny colonists to keep her company, prattling about stupidly."

This quote, about the ship and so much more, truly bored into my soul, as the book says, "If souls were real."

The writing is beautiful and the characters are rendered with such raw honesty that is refreshing to see. I wish I could come anywhere near to doing this book justice. Please read reviews of people far more eloquent and with different perspectives than my own.

The narration by Cherise Boothe is breathtaking. The variety of tone and their expressions of character and emotion are truly phenomenal. You know a narrator is good when you want to seek out other works they have read just to hear more.

Sorrowland is a novel that exists at the intersection of several subgenres. I'm tempted to categorize it as one of my favorites, "badass moms having shitty adventures." This book has the bildungsroman energy of The Bean Trees, if you replace the sweet women's fiction vibe of Kingsolver with the gritty dystopias of The Road or Parable of the Sower. I'm omitting at least three other literary influences, but this at least gets you in the right neighborhood.

The book opens with Vern, a teenaged parent and fugitive from a Black nationalist enclave called Cainland. Vern leverages her survivalist upbringing to subsist with her children in the woods, then sets off to find allies and decode the lasting effects of Cainland on her body and psyche. There's spooky transhumanism, and queer romance, and the legacy of medical racism, and GHOSTS.

This was a fast-paced read for me; I so appreciate the way that Solomon blends a literary sensibility with genre-forward storytelling. And I really liked Vern, a flawed parent and unwilling hero whose relationship with her two young children is one of the most remarkable elements of this already remarkable book. Howling and Feral are precocious, as children in SFF novels often are, but their relationships with Vern and one another feel true and fully realized; among this book's theses is the proposition that children are people, rather than physical/emotional appendages to adults.

Sorrowland is a novel about Blackness and queerness, and the haunted inheritances of these identities. Here the novel returns to more familiar literary territory, but nevertheless manages to feel fresh and improvisational, particularly when it gives us one of the Most. Remarkable. Sex Scenes. ever committed to paper. The ghosts of Sorrowland feel like a meditation, among other things, on the power of storytelling, the danger and ecstasy of daring to commune with the dead.

The conclusion of this novel didn't exactly have the shape I expected. Part of this is the Problem of Villains, and how as a reader, I can never pin down exactly what I want from villains, a detailed explication of their psychology or a nod to the banality of evil or something else entirely. So I found the book's villain plausible but not entirely satisfying. Additionally, there's a lot of backstory that gets revealed in the last act, making it feel somewhat divorced from the rest of the novel. (At the same time, this feels absolutely right—generally you are minding your own business, struggling to raise your kids and reckon with your traumas, when your past abruptly lands on you like a cartoon anvil and demands a transformation.)

This book is weird as heck, and deeply felt and deeply human. I'm very glad I picked it up.

I received this ARC from MCD Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

There she sits. And what I am curious about is this: Can the writer of science fiction sit down across from her? Is it possible? Have we any hope of catching Mrs. Brown, or are we trapped for good inside our great, gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy[...] ships capable of anything, absolutely anything, except one thing: they cannot contain Mrs. Brown.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" (1976)

An Unkindness of Ghosts takes a classic SF premise—a centuries-old generation ship hurtling away from a post-apocalyptic Earth—and uses it to tell a story about the reemergence of American chattel slavery. A bit on the nose, maybe, but in Solomon's hands you're left to wonder why other space westerns, and science fiction more broadly, haven't reckoned with slavery. A genre whose genesis is Western colonialism elides its own history, and so the obvious story is one that's rarely been told.

Since Le Guin first asked the question, If novels are rooted in character, can science fiction authors write novels?, speculative writers have retrofitted the genre's spaceships in hopes of conveying Mrs. Brown, the figure who appears dreamlike before novelists and dares them to capture her. They've succeeded to some degree. There's even a trilogy where Mrs. Brown is the spaceship. Nevertheless, the generation ship Matilda gives the impression of being built to different specifications. This tender, grim, heartbreaking book is populated by characters who feel deeply and defy expectations—gender traitors, healers, and warriors who pivot between bravery and self-destruction. (And who sometimes fall in love. This novel is also a gentle, bittersweet romance, or possibly a pair of romances, and I am so there for it.)

An Unkindness of Ghosts follows Aster (gender identity: scientist, fucks given: zero), a biohacker/herbalist/medic whose investigation into two deaths—Matilda's sovereign, and her own mother—leads her into grave danger, and a discovery that shakes the foundations of her world. While the novel belongs to Aster, we're also given electric point-of-view chapters from Aster's chosen family. Solomon's fluid, clever prose brings each character to vivid life; these are human beings with fully realized lives and pasts, struggling to invent a future for themselves.

You can definitely tell that the author graduated from an MFA program, but the ratio of literary prose to robust storytelling is a healthy one. The plot does feel slightly railroaded for the first few chapters, though it finds its footing pretty quickly. I would have liked more clarity about the rules of the world—the ruling class seems to swing between dystopian surveillance and malign neglect, which checks out if you know anything about American history but occasionally makes it difficult to foresee the hard limits of Aster and Theo's ability to resist authority. (I also would have liked a lot more specificity around the agriculture, and the physicality of farm labor, but instead Solomon gives us really lovely descriptions of Creole-influenced cooking, so can't really complain.)

Ultimately, the story is engaging and works on an emotional level, and all of it is in payment to an absolutely gripping conclusion, one whose drama and scope earn this novel a place in the annals of Great Science Fiction. I don't normally tear up when reading fiction, but oh man, this book. I was on an airplane. It was uncomfortable.

This is must-read science fiction, and an exciting new voice for the genre.

Read this for the Diversity is Lit bookclub. Check out my full thoughts here: https://youtu.be/DI_mzG9Opog

Of the nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas in the 16th - 19th centuries, it has been estimated that 1.8 million died en route, their bodies, some still alive, tossed overboard into the ocean....

And the pregnant women gave birth underwater to a new civilization and species: a mermaid-like, undersea race called the wajinru, and they live in The Deep.
Inspired by the Clipping. song "The Deep", Rivers Solomon and crew have created a smart novella about memory, survival, and the burden of generational trauma that's compelling in its world-building.

"...History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who'd lived. Who'd breathed and wept and loved and lost."

The Deep tells the story of Yetu, the historian for the Wajinru, who must remember for her entire race but the history is too heavy a burden too bear. She rebels against the duty that's been thrust upon her, even as that rebellion parallels a much more perilous threat — the surface dwellers, called two-legs, who have begun to encroach on the idyllic existence of the wajinru in their rapacious search for oil. With their invasion comes the realization of a brutal truth: Yetu and her people are in fact descendants of the two-legs, the offspring of the thousands of captives thrown overboard to drown during the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

I found the Afterward describing the shared world/inspiration of the book to be quite rewarding. Don't skip on it!

a story developed over time starting from a music piece, this afrofuturism novella is very intriguing. it creates a new underwater species made from the babies born in the ocean of women sold into slavery and then thrown overboard to drown during the Atlantic passage. then years later, the Historian has to help the species remember this history and understand it, in order to survive and change their world.½

Really intense.. like nothing I've ever read. Vern, her family and Cainland will occupy my thoughts for some time. (A big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy!

Yetu is a Historian, charged with holding all of the memories of her people. She lives in an underwater society formed from the children of enslaved mothers thrown from slave ships, who, never breathing air, learned to breathe underwater and developed gills and fins. The weight of these memories, of all of the painful things that have happened to her people from the Foremothers on, is driving Yetu almost crazy. When they hold the annual Remembering ritual, where Yetu releases the memories to the rest of her people for a brief time, she flees rather than taking the burden back. What will become of her, separated from her people and the memories -- and what will become of those she has abandoned?

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Daveed Diggs, which was delightful. I highly recommend that as a way to experience this text, if audiobooks are your thing. The story itself is immersive and a little disconcerting; you're thrown right in and have to make sense of the world as it's revealed. I'll admit that there are some flashback-like portions where Yetu is experiencing memories of the past that were a little confusing to me, especially as I couldn't page back and forth to make sense of things. Still, I found this a, well, deep read, very poignant and thought-provoking. It's a quick read/listen, but I think it will stay with me for quite a while.

Yetu is the Historian for the underwater tribe descended from African women thrown overboard from slave ships. She holds the collective memory for the entire tribe, for all of their history, so that the rest of her people need not suffer the trauma of remembering their violent past. But those memories are slowly killing Yetu, and she flees from that burden and her people. On her journey, she meets one of the two-legs and learns about the world above and what her tribe must do to survive.

Strange but powerful. I love the neo-mythic feel to the story, and I think it’s an important read. It goes on my list of books that should be required reads for high school, and could spark come great conversations.

I liked the idea of a strong caste-system being enforced on a generation ship, which launched from a post-apocalyptic earth with no destination. Planets are, in some ways, just generation ships, but it feels more claustrophobic in a ship, and therefore less room for idealism. I liked Aster and the deuteragonist, Theo a lot as part of a complicated, diverse and neurodiverse cast. And I also liked that for once in a dystopian setting, Solomon really explores the psychological impact of trauma in a way that is unflinching but still leaves room for sympathy.

But while the first half of the book was fascinating and driven by a compelling mystery, the denouement of the central mystery around page 150 requiring a bunch of pseudoscientific babble broke the metafictional agreement of mysteries (i.e. that before they are solved the reader at least has heard of all of the core components necessary to solve them; no fictional toxic heavy metal elements at the last minute.) And following that, the pacing really lagged into a series of upsetting but ultimately irrelevant oppression scenes. And ultimately, I wasn't sure what Solomon was trying to say about American slavery by telling a very conventional slavery narrative in space. I wish they had used the setting to advance the narrative.

It's The Giver but with mermaids.

The writing is really rough. Really rough. The first twenty pages consist entirely of Yetu zoning out into her "remembrances" (aka the author explains some stuff) and "nobly" suffering through her fragility; it was really lame. Gave up before anything at all happened, and I don't think I missed out on a single thing.

Aster is an agricultural laborer of the lowest class on a generation starship, which has spent hundreds of years delivering the last of humanity away from a demolished earth toward a theoretical future. Her proficiency with learning and different way of thinking have gotten her a side-job as assistant to the ship’s head doctor, but have also attracted the attention of the most ruthless of the ruling class. Aster has hope for the future when she finally cracks the code of her dead engineer mother’s journals, but when her antagonist suddenly becomes head of the whole ship she is drawn into a life-or-death conflict.

A fascinating read. The world-building is perfectly vague - while the class system on the ship exactly mimics the slave plantations of the pre-Civil War US, its unclear if it was initially designed that way or developed over time. None of the major characters are typical - their gender, sexual preferences, and neurodivergence all exist somewhere along a spectrum, not at one end or the other. That makes the few pages from other characters’ points of view particularly interesting - we know how Aster feels about her own gender and sexuality, but how is she perceived by others? The writing is also a little off-kilter - the narrative moves from one point to the next, without any dithering about walks down corridors or the thought process behind decisions. It makes the plot move quickly, and also Aster seems like the kind of narrator who would only include the important parts.

Thank you to NetGalley and MCD for giving me an arc of this book.

Sorrowland is a glittering yet haunting tale of a woman’s fight for survival as she faces the demons of her past and the monsters lurking in her future. From the very first page, I was enthralled by the lush writing style of this novel. Even when I was not sure where Solomon was going to take the book next, I was pulled into this story and did not want to leave it. In fact, I finished it in two sittings, not wanting to put it down. The three-part sections of this novel were very compelling as they became a reflection of Vern and her metamorphosis. And with every new development and plot twist, I was tugged deeper into the world Solomon created. The relationships portrayed were raw and evocative, and I adored the found family trope. I was touched by every bit of care; and wounded by every heartache. I have nothing but praise for Sorrowland and the wondrous creature it is.

Powerful mythos. Such a transformative idea that I too want to see grow and multiply.

Thanks to Libro.fm and Simon & Schuster Audio for letting me listen and review this thought-provoking book.
This was a unique story. I originally thought this was a more lighthearted story with merfolk and such, but this is based on the idea of mercreatures originating from pregnant African American slaves who were thrown overboard and drowned, but their children survived and began the race of the mercreatures in the deep.
I was interested and excited to read this, but it wasn't quite what I expected and threw me a bit. It's deeper than I was expecting and mournful, which when I realized what it was about and based on then it made more sense, but at first, I was a little confused.
There were good messages here about coming to terms with the history of slavery and being able to move past it, find peace and about sharing the weight of the grief among them.
I felt like it was a bit slow-moving in parts and I was waiting for something else to happen sometimes, but it didn't. Also, there are a few things I didn't like about the romance aspect of the story in it.

This is a beautiful, painful, creative story about remembering and connecting to the past. The pregnant women who were kidnapped to be enslaved were often thrown over board on their way across the Atlantic. This is a story of their descendants who were born in the deep and survived, and what they must do to continue surviving.

I only bought this because I have enjoyed every word that Becky Chambers has published so far. This is very different. I don't know how the collaboration came about, but ti's four authors taking turns with the same characters in the same setting, passing the timeline onto the next, they each get about 3 chapters. It works surprisingly well, with not a vast difference between the voices, I'm sure a large amount of back and forth editing occurred to smooth everything through.

Asala is a refugee come good, her family abandoned in the freezing of the outer worlds sh'es put her past behind her to become a seasoned vet, a sniper, and today a President's bodyguard protecting a visiting dignitary. The expected attack is easily foiled, and the 2nd just the same, leaving her considering a 3rd. She's not expecting to be sent on a mission with her protectee, let alone the President's 3rd child. It turns out that They have plans of their own too, and perhaps more of a conscience or at least can afford the political capital of having one, not yet being required to stand for candidacy. A Ship has gone missing - it's thought to be carrying 1000s more refugees from another dying Outer world, and both Nico and Asala are tasked with hearing anything they can find out. It turns out that Nico has suspiciously useful contacts everywhere.... but then it also turns out the refugees have developed something that every power in the System would literally kill to own, and nobody seems interested in sharing.

It's far from Becky's Cosy SF, but it's powerfully written none the less - the consequences of actions, legacy and global change, politics greed and being human all feature strongly, love for your family, and whether or not blood can or should be thicker than water? Are we all not Family? (apart from them over there).

Science fiction near it's best.½