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A review by books_with_mana
The End We Start from by Megan Hunter
5.0
What a clever commentary on motherhood, climate change, and survival.
In this novella, our unnamed protagonist is pregnant as water levels begin to rise. She gives birth in the middle of a global epidemic: floods devastate London, causing homelessness. Citizens scatter, trying to find shelter. People die from panicked herds trying to get supplies. As the fires start, groups start moving north for safety. Our narrator survives all of this while caring for her newborn.
The novella is structured like an Epic Poem. It's both a new mother's odyssey and the creation of the new era promised in the devastation in the Bible's Revelations. There are a lot of allusions to the Bible and its creation myths: golems (Old Testament), being created by God from dust, Noah's Arc, etc.
This is EXPERIMENTAL. Its lyrical prose is organized by carefully stitched vignettes. These vignettes are made out of a couple of sentences that are rarely longer than three paragraphs. The brevity of these passages leaves so much white space on the page, which emphasizes the unknown the narrator and reader experiences. Because this is written in first person, the reader only knows about the devastation if the narrator sees it. Likewise, it's unknown how the government is responding to the natural disaster and whether its an isolated incident or if the rest of the world is impacted with similar devastation.
It's so brilliantly disorienting.
I cannot help making direct connections to similar trauma and the stress of the unknown refugees must experience. The irony here is that London (a city that was the face of xenophobia leading up to Brexit) is devastated and its citizens are now refugees. It's a terrifyingly humble reminder that what separates someone from being a citizen and a refugee is luck.
This is a challenging and addictive read. If you love experimental fiction I highly recommend this. It is definitely not for everyone, but it is for me.
In this novella, our unnamed protagonist is pregnant as water levels begin to rise. She gives birth in the middle of a global epidemic: floods devastate London, causing homelessness. Citizens scatter, trying to find shelter. People die from panicked herds trying to get supplies. As the fires start, groups start moving north for safety. Our narrator survives all of this while caring for her newborn.
The novella is structured like an Epic Poem. It's both a new mother's odyssey and the creation of the new era promised in the devastation in the Bible's Revelations. There are a lot of allusions to the Bible and its creation myths: golems (Old Testament), being created by God from dust, Noah's Arc, etc.
This is EXPERIMENTAL. Its lyrical prose is organized by carefully stitched vignettes. These vignettes are made out of a couple of sentences that are rarely longer than three paragraphs. The brevity of these passages leaves so much white space on the page, which emphasizes the unknown the narrator and reader experiences. Because this is written in first person, the reader only knows about the devastation if the narrator sees it. Likewise, it's unknown how the government is responding to the natural disaster and whether its an isolated incident or if the rest of the world is impacted with similar devastation.
It's so brilliantly disorienting.
I cannot help making direct connections to similar trauma and the stress of the unknown refugees must experience. The irony here is that London (a city that was the face of xenophobia leading up to Brexit) is devastated and its citizens are now refugees. It's a terrifyingly humble reminder that what separates someone from being a citizen and a refugee is luck.
This is a challenging and addictive read. If you love experimental fiction I highly recommend this. It is definitely not for everyone, but it is for me.