Reviews - Borne | The StoryGraph

2.49k reviews for:

Borne

Jeff VanderMeer

3.93 AVERAGE

jordano101's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous dark emotional inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

wyrdwit's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Should I tell you all the ways in which this broke my heart? How I have maybe never held a character so close as I now do with Borne?

A dystopian future. A mysterious biotech company. A couple of scavengers. A monstrous flying bear. And a squid / sea anemone creature whose adolescent joy and quirky yet unsettling sense of humor often seem like the sole reasons these characters (and me) don’t remain in a state of utter despair throughout the entire story.

How is a book this strange—this weird and incomprehensible—able to coalesce into something so beautiful, deep, and meaningful? You'll have to experience that for yourself.

TL;DR (my review, not the book): Unsettling and disturbing yet somehow weirdly playful. Why is this so fun and also so sad.

montyjaq's review against another edition

4.0

dark emotional hopeful lighthearted reflective relaxing medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Imagine a post-apocolypse setting, with the coolest kind of tech there is (bioware), and a cute, friendly, but potentially terrifying product of that technology as one of the main characters. A fantastic story about person-hood, self-discovery, and incredibly written! I am calling all hotels "balcony cliffs" now because of this lol

elfangor's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

bruhdonis's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

declaired's review against another edition

4.0

A quick summary: "Borne" is a "survivors during an ongoing apocalypse" story, centered around three characters: Rachel, the scavenger, our central POV character and the one through whom we see the decay of the old world and the claustrophobia of the Company-led apocalypse; Wick, an ex-Company biotech engineer and lover of Rachel; and Borne, a creature/child/person/plant-thing that Rachel scavenges and brings home. It's a story of a city's (and a way of life) ending, told through a family drama. In the backdrop are weird and imaginative descriptions, in an aggressively strange but terribly familiar world. With flying giant bears.

Things I quite liked: Borne is the central mystery of "Borne," which is appropriate, but Borne is also So Incredibly Delightful. A lot of the humor in this book comes from Rachel and Borne's interactions, as she tries to mother/raise/teach/person-ify Borne, and the ways that does and doesn't work (Borne may be a person but Borne is not human).

One of the central questions of the book is "what makes a person a person?" and "when can a person stop being a person"

Jeff Vandermeer Loves and Supports Nature (which may or may not eat your face)

The end of the book is so obviously In Conversation with other post-apocalpytic stories; the story stands fine on its own but I love the ending specifically because it goes for some very different beats.

Spoiler

I think in other books The Magician, who is the villain here, could be the hero; she's shaped by the trauma of the world and is using those tools to fight against it. But in this story, Rachel, who scavenges, who hides, finds the trap that comes from being stuck inside and accepting/manipulating a specific system. She takes a different road, and works to rebuild the world in small ways.