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A review by iam
Beneath the Surface by Rebecca Langham
3.0
Somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars. It was good to read but the more I think about it the more I'm left shuddering by how messed up this was.
Content warnings include:
Beneath The Surface plays in a future where after a virus and steadily worsening climate conditions no nations exist anymore and the earth is parted into four quadrants ruled by one big government. A few generations ago first contact with aliens happened - a group of pacific refugees fleeing from a war on their home planet. Humanity offered to take them in, just to then break the promise of a new home: a hundred years down the line the aliens, called Outsiders, live in controlled underground colonies where they have no autonomy over their lives whatsoever, cut off from the rest of the world and exploited to produce technology for the humans living on the surface.
Born into this setting is main protagonist Lydia. She's the daughter of the Governor of Quadrant Four (which seems to be mainly Australia.) Tired of a life in the spotlight due to who her father is, she decided to become a teacher - the book starts as she begins her first job as a substitude teacher for Outsider children in the local Outsider colony.
From the very start it's clear that something is off. The heavy atmosphere of the book is so overpowering it felt almost suffocating, made worse by how every single (human) side character seems to be antagonistic or just plain creepy.
Things quickly turn disturbing as Lydia sees how the Outsiders are treated and begins researching how they even came to be in these colonies. This is where things begin to turn weird and stop lining up.
Lydia is one of four main characters from whose POVs the book is told. The second and most important one after Lydia is Alessia, an Outsider who grew up on the surface and not in the colony. She's a well respected member of the Outsider community, not just within her peers but among the human staff of the colony as well. It's clear that there's something more going on in the background with her, but it's never really brought up until the very end.
I said Alessia is one of the more important POV characters, but I guess I just wanted that to be true - in fact, barely anything important happens from her POV, but that is true for the other two POV characters as well.
The third is Fermi, another Outsider who is mostly content with his life. He doesn't like to heard of Alessia's life on the surface but other than that considers her his closest friend.
The fourth POV character is Damon, Lydia's father and leader of 25% of the planet. He's.... I don't even really know what to say about him. Let me phrase it this way: I didn't really understand why his POV was needed. The information conveyed through him could have been implemented into the other POVs. He seems to be what comes closest to being an antagonist in this book, which brings me to one of the downsides.
The book lacks a clear antagonist. The plot is obviously focused on freeing the Outsiders, but even that feels sort of aimless. So much is going on in the background, from terrorist attacks to technology addicts,big companies controlling 99% of the market to political activists making trouble, contracts and charters being ignored behind the scenes and corrupt people.... Yet there is no action, the protagonist are never really doing anything, and there is no real climax to the whole plot either. Most of the big revelations and plot twists happen in long monologues, words instead of actions.
Luckily the words were good. This book was very well written. Even when the POV character was someone I didn't like (aka Damon) I never skimmed any of the paragraphs or had trouble focussing on the book. Despite the seeming lack of anything much happening, I was never actually bored while reading.
The atmosphere was masterfully done, though the book made me uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Not only is the scenario with aliens turning up and excitement quickly turning into ignorance and oppression painfully realistic, a lot of the characters are simply despicable with creepy comments, which combined with the almost clinical way of how anyone's appearance was described was very chilling and unsettling.
That fits with the themes of the book: there's manipulation, oppression and exploitation everywhere, which left me questioning what was even real and what really happened a lot of the time.
This would have been good and should have created suspension - instead it just felt like the book was riddled with plot holes. So many things just didn't make sense in the moment, and while a lot of if was later explained in a side sentence the exact HOW of it all was left open and just left me confused and upset.
The big reveal at the end to explain it all felt extremely weird because it was a conversation between two perceived antagonists to who the reader has barely any emotional connection, which removed it from the actual protagonists and didn't feel triumphant or happy at all.
Even the supposed happy epilogue had a very unsettling and upsetting turn due to more big reveals that seemed to just turn the earlier revelation around and made the entire plot vaguely nonsensical to me.
Overall this book definitely touched me - I couldn't stop thinking about it since I finished it, but it's leaving me disturbed instead of with positive feelings which makes it hard to paint this book in a good light.
One good thing the book has speaking for itself is the lack of queerphobia. Not everything is perfect, but most of the main characters are queer, the main couple is f/f and the secondary is m/m, though romance is definitely not the focus here. I also really liked the Outsiders approach to gender: their children (called younglings) are raised gender neutrally and there is a ceremony (the only thing coming close to culture they have) where a person can share and declare their gender with the community. It seems to be hinted that most Outsiders are intersex, but they can also change their physical traits when their identity changes, though this isn't explained in depth.
Ultimately I guess I did enjoy reading this book. It had many great concepts and touched a lot of important topics, but it frequently left me very unsettled and I'm confused by many of the turns so it seems to me that there are tons of plot holes and unrealized potential.
Content warnings include:
Spoiler
systematic oppression where one group of people is locked in underground facilities where they have no autonomy over anything in their life and people regularly get culled or relocated for no apparent reason, exploitation, erasing of culture, racism, graphic descriptions of death and injuries from bombsBeneath The Surface plays in a future where after a virus and steadily worsening climate conditions no nations exist anymore and the earth is parted into four quadrants ruled by one big government. A few generations ago first contact with aliens happened - a group of pacific refugees fleeing from a war on their home planet. Humanity offered to take them in, just to then break the promise of a new home: a hundred years down the line the aliens, called Outsiders, live in controlled underground colonies where they have no autonomy over their lives whatsoever, cut off from the rest of the world and exploited to produce technology for the humans living on the surface.
Born into this setting is main protagonist Lydia. She's the daughter of the Governor of Quadrant Four (which seems to be mainly Australia.) Tired of a life in the spotlight due to who her father is, she decided to become a teacher - the book starts as she begins her first job as a substitude teacher for Outsider children in the local Outsider colony.
From the very start it's clear that something is off. The heavy atmosphere of the book is so overpowering it felt almost suffocating, made worse by how every single (human) side character seems to be antagonistic or just plain creepy.
Things quickly turn disturbing as Lydia sees how the Outsiders are treated and begins researching how they even came to be in these colonies. This is where things begin to turn weird and stop lining up.
Lydia is one of four main characters from whose POVs the book is told. The second and most important one after Lydia is Alessia, an Outsider who grew up on the surface and not in the colony. She's a well respected member of the Outsider community, not just within her peers but among the human staff of the colony as well. It's clear that there's something more going on in the background with her, but it's never really brought up until the very end.
I said Alessia is one of the more important POV characters, but I guess I just wanted that to be true - in fact, barely anything important happens from her POV, but that is true for the other two POV characters as well.
The third is Fermi, another Outsider who is mostly content with his life. He doesn't like to heard of Alessia's life on the surface but other than that considers her his closest friend.
The fourth POV character is Damon, Lydia's father and leader of 25% of the planet. He's.... I don't even really know what to say about him. Let me phrase it this way: I didn't really understand why his POV was needed. The information conveyed through him could have been implemented into the other POVs. He seems to be what comes closest to being an antagonist in this book, which brings me to one of the downsides.
The book lacks a clear antagonist. The plot is obviously focused on freeing the Outsiders, but even that feels sort of aimless. So much is going on in the background, from terrorist attacks to technology addicts,big companies controlling 99% of the market to political activists making trouble, contracts and charters being ignored behind the scenes and corrupt people.... Yet there is no action, the protagonist are never really doing anything, and there is no real climax to the whole plot either. Most of the big revelations and plot twists happen in long monologues, words instead of actions.
Luckily the words were good. This book was very well written. Even when the POV character was someone I didn't like (aka Damon) I never skimmed any of the paragraphs or had trouble focussing on the book. Despite the seeming lack of anything much happening, I was never actually bored while reading.
The atmosphere was masterfully done, though the book made me uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Not only is the scenario with aliens turning up and excitement quickly turning into ignorance and oppression painfully realistic, a lot of the characters are simply despicable with creepy comments, which combined with the almost clinical way of how anyone's appearance was described was very chilling and unsettling.
That fits with the themes of the book: there's manipulation, oppression and exploitation everywhere, which left me questioning what was even real and what really happened a lot of the time.
This would have been good and should have created suspension - instead it just felt like the book was riddled with plot holes. So many things just didn't make sense in the moment, and while a lot of if was later explained in a side sentence the exact HOW of it all was left open and just left me confused and upset.
The big reveal at the end to explain it all felt extremely weird because it was a conversation between two perceived antagonists to who the reader has barely any emotional connection, which removed it from the actual protagonists and didn't feel triumphant or happy at all.
Even the supposed happy epilogue had a very unsettling and upsetting turn due to more big reveals that seemed to just turn the earlier revelation around and made the entire plot vaguely nonsensical to me.
Overall this book definitely touched me - I couldn't stop thinking about it since I finished it, but it's leaving me disturbed instead of with positive feelings which makes it hard to paint this book in a good light.
One good thing the book has speaking for itself is the lack of queerphobia. Not everything is perfect, but most of the main characters are queer, the main couple is f/f and the secondary is m/m, though romance is definitely not the focus here. I also really liked the Outsiders approach to gender: their children (called younglings) are raised gender neutrally and there is a ceremony (the only thing coming close to culture they have) where a person can share and declare their gender with the community. It seems to be hinted that most Outsiders are intersex, but they can also change their physical traits when their identity changes, though this isn't explained in depth.
Ultimately I guess I did enjoy reading this book. It had many great concepts and touched a lot of important topics, but it frequently left me very unsettled and I'm confused by many of the turns so it seems to me that there are tons of plot holes and unrealized potential.