Scan barcode
A review by kjcharles
R/evolution by Tenea D. Johnson
A novel about a future USA destroyed by brutal anti-Black racism, wealth inequality, lack of healthcare and climate change. So, barely SF at all, really. The basic premise traces Ezekiel, a brilliant geneticist who genetically engineers babies of the poor as reparations, but it spans about fifty years and three generations.
What's weird is, it's novella length but it isn't a novella. It reads somewhere between linked short stories and extracts from a 600pp SF family saga. The reader gets a section of the story, and then the next section is five or ten years on and we have to fill in the missing bits.
I am not sure how I feel about that tbh in that I actually wanted to read the full novel, to get the love story and the character arcs and the betrayals and losses on the page. I didn't engage emotionally in the way I would definitely have done at full length because it was a great, well developed world and the characters were compelling even only getting a fraction of the story. (From my novel-loving perspective, that is: the author obv told the story as she wanted, in these sections.) I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.
What's weird is, it's novella length but it isn't a novella. It reads somewhere between linked short stories and extracts from a 600pp SF family saga. The reader gets a section of the story, and then the next section is five or ten years on and we have to fill in the missing bits.
I am not sure how I feel about that tbh in that I actually wanted to read the full novel, to get the love story and the character arcs and the betrayals and losses on the page. I didn't engage emotionally in the way I would definitely have done at full length because it was a great, well developed world and the characters were compelling even only getting a fraction of the story. (From my novel-loving perspective, that is: the author obv told the story as she wanted, in these sections.) I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.