Even Canada isn’t safe from our horrible future

Not a boxing book like I thought it was going to be!

I have read some Nalo Hopkinson before and that book was a kind of post-colonial, magical realist book about a child from the sea. I liked it.

I liked this one too, but man oh man was it way different. This book is kind of Neal Stephenson writing a Jamaica Kincaid novel. Or William Gibson writing Gloria Naylor.

Oh, with some light eroticism and heavy body-horror mixed in.

It’s kind of Hoodoo Punk.

Anyway, the novel takes place in Toronto in a future world where corporatist syndicates sort of rule everything including organ harvesting from pigs. A local politician who has been railing against the indecencies of this organ harvesting needs a new heart and even though pig organs are apostasy, stealing from street people is not. The bulk of the story revolves around a mother and her grown daughter, the out of wedlock baby, and the would-be father who is all caught up in the organ harvesting plot. The story involves a lot of chasing through abandoned cityscapes, burnt-out malls, kind of zombies, magic, and horrible horrible torture.

All of that! There’s some pretty gruesome torture that goes on in this book and it’s not only visited upon someone, but also threatened to someone else in that kind of horrible waiting for the shoe to drop kind of way.

The writing is strong, the sci-fi and world building is really interesting. But boy does this just feel so much like a late 90s novel.