A review by lanternheart
American Rapture by CJ Leede

adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I hesitate to give anything a full 5 stars, but Leede's book transported me — for good, ill, and every stomach-churning moment inbetween — for five days straight, and for that, I both salute it and rank it quite highly in my last month of reading for the year. American Rapture is not for the faint against its subject matter: if sexual assault is a trigger for you, I would strongly advise against reading this book. The themes of non-consensual sex, instances of rape and sexual violence, and other similar material is unavoidable due to the nature of the imaginary virus (an extreme form of syphilis) that Leede has created and infested her landscape with.

That being said, I was deeply taken in by not only the horror of the story, but the psychology of its main character, Sophie. A deeply sheltered Catholic teenager transforms in the crucible of Leede's scorching world, venturing out from
the aftermath of her parents' death to a manic, sexual virus wherein they nearly devour one another whole
. That she
killed her father
herself is one of only the start of a chain of horrors that Sophie both witnesses and partakes in, are foisted upon her and that she crumbles beneath, struggling to learn how to lift herself out, to learn that she can do so without the shackles of her strict religious upbringing. In the chaos of the spreading virus, Sophie is on the hunt for her twin, Noah, who hasn't been living with his family for some time at the book's outset. Beneath the quest for finding Noah is the question of why he's no longer at home, why he was taken from the house that Sophie desperately wants rid of — and Leede's reveal is deeply human, shocking but unfortunately far more real than the sex-wild, near-zombie-like people that roam the shellshocked Midwest that we journey through.

I was worried how Leede would handle Ben's
cultural background and family history, once it was brought up in relation to the apocalypse group's stop at the Ho-Chunk reservation
. With Leede as a white writer, I was surprised to find that Ben's conflict over his mother's choices felt familiar: he's clearly still figuring things out in an incredibly thorny situation, knowing how to parse his mother's choice to
leave the reservation
with his own desire to reconnect in the wake of disaster. That the book ends with
a trip into a reservation, into Native America,
while white America tears itself apart in evangelical self-sabotage, was an unexpected turn, but not one I'm unhappy with. That
Noah's letter writes about the virus maybe having been a good thing
was a bit harder to sit easily with than that, as was the
death of Cleo and Maro,
but little about this book does sit easily on its reader. It was scathing, intimate, bruised, and hard to put down.
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