Another little perk of attending ALA Midwinter is the presence of several publishers (thought I’m told not as many as attend the ALA annual conference in June) whose sole purpose is to throw large numbers of advanced reader copies (ARC’s) of the books, about which they are hoping to create some readerly buzz, at all the librarians in attendance. Having just spent a few weeks winnowing down my book collection (more on that in a future post), I felt like a semi-recovered addict thrown back into the opium den. Ahem. But I got some cool books.
Chief among those is the new young adult book by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
I have read Paolo Bacigalupi’s book, and it’s my favorite of his so far (I’ve read his Pump Six collection, The Windup Girl, and Ship Breaker), with particularly strong storytelling. It’s a near-future dystopian young adult novel in which climate change has caused massive changes in the former United States, parts of which have devolved into permanent civil war, terrorized by roving gangs of child soldiers. It’s a terrible world, made all the more terrible with the knowledge that what Bacigalupi describes in this fictional world is actually happening, now, in the real world. The locals’ attitudes about meddling foreign government and the experiences of the main character, Mahlia, who is the abandoned daughter of a foreign peacekeeping soldier and local woman are reminiscent of the children of American G.I.’s in Vietnam (derisively called “children of the dust”).
There’s also a really sophisticated treatment of nonviolence in the book, as Mahlia decides what she is willing to do to survive, and how far she is willing to go to try to save her friend, Mouse, aided by Tool, an half-man augmented with the DNA of half a dozen predators to turn him into the perfect killing machine, who nevertheless shows more humanity at times than the full humans around him.
In short, highly recommended. The book isn’t available until April/May, unfortunately, and if I really had my ARC act together I’d wait until closer to the release date, but the last time I did that I wound up forgetting and then never posting a review (for Ready Player One, which was also a good read), and that made me feel bad. So here ya go…
