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A review by suzemo
The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia
3.0
I have this book on kindle, however, I grabbed the audiobook because it is read by Robin Miles, one of my favorite narrators. I love Kat Sedia - her stuff is very inventive and very different from most books.
This is a coming of age story with a main character named Vimbai, a college student who is studying marine biology. She is the daughter of Zimbabwean immigrants, and she wishes to escape both her over-bearing mother and her African/Zimbabwean culture and be a "typical" New Jersey college student. As she is wandering through the dunes, she finds a notice for a household looking for a roommate. The house is also in the dunes, and features two roommates, Felix, a pale man who has a micro-universe for hair and Maya, a bartender from Atlantic city.
Everything starts out strange, with creatures living under the porch, a link to the horseshoe crabs Vimbai wishes to study, and a "psychic energy baby" in the phone lines. Then things go utterly, and fantastically wack-a-loo, with the house sailing off into the sea, and changing shape and size. African urban folk tale characters appear in the house, like Vimbai's dead grandmother, a Man-Fish, and the wazimamoto (vampire like creatures who suck the blood from the horseshoe crabs, and symbolically the African Culture from Vimbai).
Vimbai has to come to terms with her family and her culture as she finds solutions to the fantastical situations and conflicts that arise, and in that sense it is a coming of age (or coming of culture?) story.
The story can be taken at face value, but I think the strength lies in the face that all of the characters, events, and actions in the story have a deeper meaning (without bludgeoning one over the head). It's well written, and I think it's a good story, it just might have been asking too much of me at the time I read/listened to it. The characterizations are pretty solid and I liked it; I might revisit it at a later time, though, as I felt I wasn't giving this book the attention it deserved.
This is a coming of age story with a main character named Vimbai, a college student who is studying marine biology. She is the daughter of Zimbabwean immigrants, and she wishes to escape both her over-bearing mother and her African/Zimbabwean culture and be a "typical" New Jersey college student. As she is wandering through the dunes, she finds a notice for a household looking for a roommate. The house is also in the dunes, and features two roommates, Felix, a pale man who has a micro-universe for hair and Maya, a bartender from Atlantic city.
Everything starts out strange, with creatures living under the porch, a link to the horseshoe crabs Vimbai wishes to study, and a "psychic energy baby" in the phone lines. Then things go utterly, and fantastically wack-a-loo, with the house sailing off into the sea, and changing shape and size. African urban folk tale characters appear in the house, like Vimbai's dead grandmother, a Man-Fish, and the wazimamoto (vampire like creatures who suck the blood from the horseshoe crabs, and symbolically the African Culture from Vimbai).
Vimbai has to come to terms with her family and her culture as she finds solutions to the fantastical situations and conflicts that arise, and in that sense it is a coming of age (or coming of culture?) story.
The story can be taken at face value, but I think the strength lies in the face that all of the characters, events, and actions in the story have a deeper meaning (without bludgeoning one over the head). It's well written, and I think it's a good story, it just might have been asking too much of me at the time I read/listened to it. The characterizations are pretty solid and I liked it; I might revisit it at a later time, though, as I felt I wasn't giving this book the attention it deserved.