Relief Map by Rosalie Knecht
My rating: 4/5 cats
She often thought now about the power everybody had to ruin everybody else. You could do it by accident, just by showing up, or you could make the wrong decisions in such small pieces that by the time you realized what you were doing, it was too late.
sixteen-year-old livy markos feels cramped in her hometown of lomath, pennsylvania; a town “half a mile long,” even before a fugitive takes shelter within its borders and they are cut off from the rest of the world by an electrical and telecommunications lockdown as well as by the police officers and the fbi guarding the town’s perimeter.
the book is many things – it’s a rust belt Lord of the Flies, where lomath becomes the crucible in which secrets are revealed, tension builds, tempers flare, suspicion runs rampant, old resentments fester – all the things you would expect when people are cut off from technology, given explanations either conflicting or confusing, and there’s at least one conspiracy theory nut in the mix.
it’s a scaled-down terrorism-response allegory where a combination of fear, misinformation, and poorly-executed crisis management services propel livy, her best friend nelson, and several other local youths into a string of criminal activities as self-defense, while livy harbors her own secret crime and the citizens of lomath, restless and frustrated by the prolonged quarantine, take matters into their own hands.
it’s a timely cautionary tale that pits a terrified community against an unspecified “other,” where the collective fear and the solidarity of a shared crisis snowballs until regular folks are forced into action because of the systemic failures of services meant to provide protection, information, or relief.
it’s also a fine coming-of-age story, as livy learns some truths about herself, her parents, and the world around her:
He was a ghost, a story that only Nelson knew. He would be her currency of intimacy. Many people might know little things about her but there would be very few in her whole life, she thought, who would hear this secret. It would always be with her, right there at her elbow. That was what made you grown-up, she thought: having the past following you around. Having a past at all, really.
livy is a likable character, whose introspection sets her apart from many others in her town, and her outlook is simultaneously fanciful and realistic:
“I’m feeling anxious,” she said. She had always been good at identifying her emotions by their names, even when in the grip of them. She thought this was probably a talent, though not a great one.
she provides half of the novel’s voice, with the rest supplied by revaz deni – fugitive, suspected terrorist, food-deprived philosopher:
The thing was that the less you had, the harder it was to get anything. The light-headedness of hunger made this seem very profound. He had nothing.
it’s a really strong debut, which reminded me somewhat of Wake or Under the Dome or any of those other suburban-isolation stories, but this one has less-horrific consequences, zero necrophilia, and a more delicately hopeful ending.
worth your time.
