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mayhappily 's review for:
Zoo City
by Lauren Beukes
During the 1980s, a strange plague swept across the world and in its wake, it left a phenomenon that would be known as ‘animalling'.
'Animalling' is so called because it leaves anyone guilty of a serious crime partnered with an animal familiar, a mashavi. In Zinzi December, Lauren Beukes' main protagonist of Zoo City's, case, the familiar in question is a Sloth. [I personally really like the fact that the animal familiars weren't the more "typical" animals you might've expected; it's not a black cat, a wolf, an owl - it's a Sloth, a Maltese and an albino alligator.]
With the mashavi comes a gift, a shavi. Zinzi's is the ability to find lost items; a wedding ring, a book, a photo album. She doesn't usually go looking for missing people, but between the e-mail scams she works for a criminal organisation and the finder's fee she earns for locating said wedding ring, book and photo album, she never seems to be able to make a dent in the ever growing debt she owes to aformentioned criminal organisation, so when offered a generous wage just to find Songweza Radebe, one half of the pop sensation iJusi, she says yes.
Little did she know that things are rarely as straightforward as they seem in Lauren Beukes' world.
As with the previous books of Lauren Beukes that I've read, The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters, it takes a [good] while to really get into the story of Zoo City, but, also in common with previous works, once you've gotten past the slow beginning [and middle], it becomes almost impossible to put the book down.
It gets inside your head, in the best way possible: the choices made aren't always the "obviously right" ones and Zinzi isn't the typically flawless heroine, but she is an interesting one.
The few negative things I think are worth mentioning are:
- that the book is filled with South African slang (which seems to be a mix of Zulu, Shona and Afrikaans), and while most of it is made guessable by the context, not all is and this bothers me. While I definitely don't wish that the book had been filled with footnotes, maybe a collection of common slang in the back could've been useful.
- that the ending came a bit out of the blue. There had been some alluding to it, but I think that it could've been built up a bit more. It almost feels as if Lauren had spent so much energy building up the character(s) that she couldn't hold back any longer once she started to reach the point of unravelling.
That said, my overall impression is a positive one. I loved that it was set in South Africa, I found the idea of animalling very interesting and I've so far always really liked Lauren Beukes' less than typical characters.
'Animalling' is so called because it leaves anyone guilty of a serious crime partnered with an animal familiar, a mashavi. In Zinzi December, Lauren Beukes' main protagonist of Zoo City's, case, the familiar in question is a Sloth. [I personally really like the fact that the animal familiars weren't the more "typical" animals you might've expected; it's not a black cat, a wolf, an owl - it's a Sloth, a Maltese and an albino alligator.]
With the mashavi comes a gift, a shavi. Zinzi's is the ability to find lost items; a wedding ring, a book, a photo album. She doesn't usually go looking for missing people, but between the e-mail scams she works for a criminal organisation and the finder's fee she earns for locating said wedding ring, book and photo album, she never seems to be able to make a dent in the ever growing debt she owes to aformentioned criminal organisation, so when offered a generous wage just to find Songweza Radebe, one half of the pop sensation iJusi, she says yes.
Little did she know that things are rarely as straightforward as they seem in Lauren Beukes' world.
As with the previous books of Lauren Beukes that I've read, The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters, it takes a [good] while to really get into the story of Zoo City, but, also in common with previous works, once you've gotten past the slow beginning [and middle], it becomes almost impossible to put the book down.
It gets inside your head, in the best way possible: the choices made aren't always the "obviously right" ones and Zinzi isn't the typically flawless heroine, but she is an interesting one.
The few negative things I think are worth mentioning are:
- that the book is filled with South African slang (which seems to be a mix of Zulu, Shona and Afrikaans), and while most of it is made guessable by the context, not all is and this bothers me. While I definitely don't wish that the book had been filled with footnotes, maybe a collection of common slang in the back could've been useful.
- that the ending came a bit out of the blue. There had been some alluding to it, but I think that it could've been built up a bit more. It almost feels as if Lauren had spent so much energy building up the character(s) that she couldn't hold back any longer once she started to reach the point of unravelling.
That said, my overall impression is a positive one. I loved that it was set in South Africa, I found the idea of animalling very interesting and I've so far always really liked Lauren Beukes' less than typical characters.