Rating: 5 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novella

Raquel is an archeologist who, along with her botanist wife, studies pocket worlds. They are small bubbles of existence, sometimes as big as a large island, sometimes as small as a cardboard box. They are worlds with mermaids or dinosaurs, worlds where time goes faster or slower, worlds where humanity hasn’t yet left its mark. But Raquel, for all that she loves studying these places, finding traces of humanity in cave paintings, fossilized bones, tools, and burial sites, is looking for something else. She’s looking for the Taino, her ancestors, in the hopes that some of them might have escaped their fate at the hands of the Conquistadors, that somewhere, somehow, they’re still living.

This is both one of the most imaginative books I’ve read and one of the most depressing in equal measure. Did I like it? Yes, kind of? Because this book gives an unrelenting glimpse into an all too realistic depiction of humanity. If people did find worlds where mermaids existed, yes, we’d put them in fish tanks after either hunting them, or pollute their ocean until they died. What would we do with extinct birds and plants? Put them in zoos. Sell them for money. Exploit them and destroy them. Have a world where time goes slow? Plant crops that grow slowly while, in the real world, no time at all has passed.

The rich here have pocket worlds small enough to fit over their hands so that time stops and models, politicians, and socialites can have the hands of a twenty-year old while being decades older. The rich profit, the poor suffer, and world after world is despoiled and destroyed. It’s bleak and unrelenting and the world building is so good it hurts.

And yet. The ideas in this book are engaging and thought provoking. What happens to someone who vanishes for an hour, only to return to a world where decades have passed? What happens to a mother when she realizes the child she left behind …. is gone? What is it that makes us a person? Where do sentience and sapience overlap, and why — when all the world is falling apart around us — does humanity still hope, still think that, somehow, everything can and will get better? This is one of those books that I’ll be thinking of for some time after reading it; one of those books I’m not sure if I enjoyed reading, but I’m very glad I did read.

If you’re into speculative fiction, well written and honest and that takes a long, hard, and unforgiving look at where our hunger to consume and own will take us, this book is for you. If you enjoy meditations on the human condition, on how AI is progressing, how fast and how intelligent and how easy it is to blur the lines between what is and isn’t human, this book is for you. If you like character studies that involve grief, introspection, and pain that yields before a graceful and poignant cathartic ending … this book is for you.

The hell of it is, I’m not sure if this was the book for me. While I admire the author for their creativity and their skill in writing, I’m still digesting my own thoughts. Even so, it’s a five-star book that won’t be for everyone, and I really hope it finds it’s audience because it very much deserves to be read.