Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]
A lovely surprise from ElCicco!
I am counting down the minutes until I go on Christmas vacation. MINUTES. And tonight I came home to a lovely Cannonball Book Exchange surprise. Two kinds of chocolates (one of which has already been sampled), Orbiter, and An Unkindness of Ghosts. All this, and a lovely card. I am so pleased and cannot wait to settle in and enjoy the generosity of ElCicco. Thank you!
Aster didn’t mean it
This book fits into my Underrepresented bingo slot. Rivers Solomon is a black woman writing in sci-fi. I wanted so much to like this book, I really did, but I bounced hard off of it and struggled to finish. I can appreciate, intellectually, what Solomon was going for but I did not enjoy my time with this book at all. The book is set on an inter generational space ship that is starting to break down. And though humans have left Earth behind, they haven’t […]
My first, last, and only
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. This was the most difficult book I’ve read all year and perhaps the most worthwhile. The story takes place on a generation ship, where the wealthy white people live in luxury on the upper decks and the black people* live enslaved on the lower decks, forced to do manual labor and endure the cruel oversight of the white people (who have developed a(n even) weird(er) religion to excuse/justify their behavior). It’s definitely a book filled with vivid and shocking […]