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kdybala 's review for:
Hummingbird Salamander
by Jeff VanderMeer
I listened to the audiobook, so it's hard to know how much of my experience was influenced by the person narrating, or maybe my perspective as a conservation ecologist, but wow this was bleak. It was like spending hours with the most depressing doom-and-gloom defeatist colleague, who also hangs out with the worst people in the world. I really didn't care about any of the characters, least of all our narrator, who doesn't seem to care about anyone, who from the beginning tells us she is lying to us about some things - even though by the end there's no real reason to lie - and who is extremely, inexplicably paranoid from the very start. The mystery/clues aspect was the only thing that really kept me engaged, but by the end I still didn't understand the intricacies of the plot or who did what to whom. Possibly because their names kept changing? Or possibly because I didn't care anymore by that point. It felt like there was a heavy message VanderMeer was trying to convey throughout, but all that came through to me was "the world is ending" and "people are the worst."