An Unkindness of Ghosts

Starred review from August 14, 2017
Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine. On the generational starship Matilda, which will take hundreds of years to reach its destination despite traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, a tech-ignorant white supremacy cult called the Sovereignty runs on the labor and intimidation of a black enslaved class. This is worldbuilding by poetry; hard science fiction fans may look in vain for some of the elements they expect from a generation ship story, as the narrative instead relies on many layers of metaphor. Aster Grey, orphaned from birth and raised in slavery on deck Q, teaches herself medicine and much more. She discovers that notes handed down by her mother are encoded and may map the Sovereignty’s fatal weakness, but as the notes become shuffled, divided, damaged, and destroyed, it’s unclear whether Aster can ever fully decode them. Neuroatypical Aster is literal and unsparing as she examines her precarious life and flawed environment; she accepts the horrors of objective reality but struggles passionately with the allusions and evasions of human interaction. Solomon packs so many conflicts—chiefly concerning race, gender, and faith, but also patriarchy, education, mental illness, abortion, and more—into a relatively brief space that the story momentarily strains here and there to contain everything. The overall achievement, however, is stunning. Agent: Laura Zats, Red Sofa Literary.

Narrator Cherise Boothe has her hands full with this story set aboard an interstellar ark for humanity. The HSS MATILDA has the class structure of the pre-Civil War South, with overseers on the upper decks and sharecroppers down below. With each section having its own patois and the rulers their own stiff language, Boothe must juggle a dozen different accents and dialects, and she does so with ease. Aster, the novel's protagonist, is an outsider even among her own on the lower decks, a scientist and assistant to the surgeon. Thanks to Boothe, the listener can distinguish which of Aster's gaggle of roommates and relatives is speaking at any point and cheer her as she struggles to break free of her cage. D.E.M. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine