Book No. 52 of 2020
This book is like A Wrinkle in Time if A Wrinkle in Time were extraordinarily violent and full of gruesome death and hair-raising torture. I intentionally don’t look up what books are about before I read them and understood this to be a sci-fi novel—after reading this, and looking it up on google to get the cover for this post, I saw that it’s classified as fantasy-horror, which makes WAY more sense.
Overall I enjoyed this book—the first quarter or so had me unsure whether this universe was worth investing in, but once the plot and subplots got going I was hooked; having recently gotten a cat, I was especially charmed by one of the characters befriending a lion. The story is partially grounded in reality, with US presidents involved in the narrative and pop culture references sprinkled in, which helps as a framework while characters talk about dimensions and resurrections and the manipulation of space and time. It’s also very violent! Cannot overstate this in case literary graphic violence is not your thing. (I’m generally fine with violence in books, but if this were ever made into a movie, I would absolutely not be able to watch it.)
Similar Reads
One of the crucial points of the story involves the same thing that, to me, was the most gruesome bit of Sue Burke’s Semiosis, and now I have a specific category for books in which *that thing* happens.
Both the behavior of the “dead people” and the cultish vibe of “Father” gave me big Severance (by Ling Ma) vibes.
There is a satisfying “aha, the master plan” moment, which combined with the writing style reminded me of Dan Brown’s books (but the connection may be tenuous, as the last time I read a Dan Brown novel was over ten years ago).