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A review by chillvamp
Annihilation by Catherynne M. Valente
5.0
I've read quite a few books by Cat Valente, and her style is hit-and-miss with me. I loved "Six Gun Snow White", but I put down "Palimpsest" not even halfway through. This one though was definitely a hit with me.
I picked it up because I adore Mass Effect and, after playing Andromeda, the question of "what happened to the quarian ark?" was definitely one that had me curious. I expected to be a little put off by Valente's usual poetry-adjacent prose style; my tolerance for flowery language is very low, I like clear prose that doesn't sacrifice immediate readability for the sake of a particular aesthetic and I want clever metaphors to be a rare delight, not every other sentence. What had me wary was that the premise of this book is essentially a mystery thriller, a "whodunnit", and I didn't think meandering language would serve that premise very well.
The great thing about Cat Valente is that she isn't a one-trick-pony (which is why I keep checking out her books) and she proved it with this one. The first couple chapters had to do the heavy lifting of introducing characters and potentially the world of Mass Effect if the reader is, somehow, new to the series. That exposition is a burden all game tie-ins have to bear. That said, she absolved herself of that very skillfully and without straying from the focus of the book, and kept it interesting, and once that weight was off her shoulders, the book went to FTL speed.
With every chapter, it got more and more engaging. She does a wonderful job of raising the stakes at the end of every chapter, and I came to expect that, just when I thought things couldn't get worse, something surely was. That made it very easy to sympathise with the characters, who feel much the same way, and to make the Keelah Si'yah feel like the giant liveship it is, filled with a million motives and hopes for the new world. And as I got through it, I realized that at some point I had started to really care about the characters in the book, some of who highlight some racial tropes and inside jokes from the series, and yet feel completely alive and real. I finished this book wanting to boot up Andromeda again and find a planet for a batarian and a drell to build a house, because that got me in the feels so hard.
In short: EVERYBODY GO READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!!!
I picked it up because I adore Mass Effect and, after playing Andromeda, the question of "what happened to the quarian ark?" was definitely one that had me curious. I expected to be a little put off by Valente's usual poetry-adjacent prose style; my tolerance for flowery language is very low, I like clear prose that doesn't sacrifice immediate readability for the sake of a particular aesthetic and I want clever metaphors to be a rare delight, not every other sentence. What had me wary was that the premise of this book is essentially a mystery thriller, a "whodunnit", and I didn't think meandering language would serve that premise very well.
The great thing about Cat Valente is that she isn't a one-trick-pony (which is why I keep checking out her books) and she proved it with this one. The first couple chapters had to do the heavy lifting of introducing characters and potentially the world of Mass Effect if the reader is, somehow, new to the series. That exposition is a burden all game tie-ins have to bear. That said, she absolved herself of that very skillfully and without straying from the focus of the book, and kept it interesting, and once that weight was off her shoulders, the book went to FTL speed.
With every chapter, it got more and more engaging. She does a wonderful job of raising the stakes at the end of every chapter, and I came to expect that, just when I thought things couldn't get worse, something surely was. That made it very easy to sympathise with the characters, who feel much the same way, and to make the Keelah Si'yah feel like the giant liveship it is, filled with a million motives and hopes for the new world. And as I got through it, I realized that at some point I had started to really care about the characters in the book, some of who highlight some racial tropes and inside jokes from the series, and yet feel completely alive and real. I finished this book wanting to boot up Andromeda again and find a planet for a batarian and a drell to build a house, because that got me in the feels so hard.
In short: EVERYBODY GO READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!!!