Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat
My rating: 3/5 cats
i wrote a review for this, already, for another source—michael isn’t the only one who can cuckold a website! but so i haven’t really wanted to write a whole new review, but i didn’t think it was seemly to cut and paste the one i already wrote. and that blank spot has been tormenting me with its blankness…
so i gotta write something.
as a physical object, this book is gorgeous. and like anything gorgeous, it isn’t going to give you its number at the end of the night. not unless you work little for it first.
but it can be exhausting. i am not a reader of science fiction, and the exhaustively-detailed world-building elements just rattled me. i went in thinking, “oh, polar bears, cool…” and it was just a barrage of information that i felt the book expected me to know already. it was like one of those anxiety-dreams where you are taking a test in a subject you know nothing about.
this book just kind of hucks you into a world that is kind of like our world, but when and how and huh? it is arctic and quasi-steampunk but also not at the same time. confused? yeah, me too. and eventually some of the mythology is exposed (but slooooowly) but in the meantime there are foppish men and polar greenhouses, indigenous inuits and white interlopers, sexified nightclubs and menacing airships and a polar kangaroo and a caste of waste management workers in plague masks. also shamans and more commercial magicians and revolutionaries and a corrupt council and snow and drugs and a freaking duke and a conjoined, hermaphroditic love-object. ghosts and zombies round out the cast just for good measure. i mean, wow. this ain’t your momma’s robert peary.
so, i will probably read the other two books when they come out, because i am very attracted to the pretty covers, i just hope i can get to second base this time.
hey, pictures!!
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