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A review by thepurplebookwyrm
The Mimameid Solution by Katherine Kempf
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
DNFing at 52%, but standing by my partial rating of 2/5 stars. Because the cultural world-building in this was not only garbage, but borderline... offensive actually. š¬ More later.
Full video review: https://youtu.be/UvNiceyaA54.
Synopsis:
Set scene: near-future climate apocalypse + volcanic winterā¦ the Ulster Irish take over the Republic, presumably mass convert the nation to Neo-Druidry (rofl) and conquer the UK ā because this is a badly novelised EU IV campaign ā then do a āreverse-Viking' for shits nā giggles and go rampaging in Scandinavia for resources (but not, ya know, in the Netherlands? Belgium? Northern France? I mean itās all right there across the Channel but yaight). Some āNorseā folks in Scandinavia live in a (presumably) Asatru-dedicated techno-bunker and do shit.
Yes, please make sure to read all of the above with a very, and I do mean very heavy tone of sarcasm.
Review:
I always try and remain fair towards books, even when I thoroughly dislike them, so Iāll start by listing the very few positives I have to share about this one:
ā¢ The prose was fluid overall. There was good descriptive writing. The text itself read pretty quickly (thank goodness for that, I wouldnāt have made it to 52% otherwise). The dialogues were fine as well, from a structural andā¦ āthese humans sound humanā point of view at least.
ā¢ The āpost-apocalyptic techno-bunker societyā premise was decently intriguing on its own.
ā¢ As was the book's basic "weāre gonna do a 'reverse-Viking' with peeps from the Hiberno-British Islands" idea...
Alas! The execution of said basic idea was an abject, and I mean abject failure because the world-building needed to create solid, believable foundations for it to actually work was entirely missing. Yes, the world-building was hot garbage AND, it not only broke my immersion pretty quickly, it also read as mildly offensive, quite frankly!
The world-building, or why itās not okay to do this kind of shit with living cultures, including white European ones:
a) A lot of things did not make any sense from a strictly 'post-apocalyptic survival' point of view: access to certain kinds of resources that had previously been established to be rare, scorched-earth raiding tactics employed by people otherwise looking for viable land to settle (?!), cultural and linguistic take-overs that wouldn't make an iota of sense without the presence of a state governments... which had been established, in-text, to have collapsed, etc...
b) This major issue was further compounded by the fact I was basically given the impression the story took place in the near-future. Nothing specific was ever given in terms of dates, or broader timelines, but judging by the general level of tech people claimed they'd only just recently lost access to, Iād say the book's plot canāt have taken place more than one, maybe two generations at the absolute maximum from now. Concerning what the book stated regarding the shifts in religious and linguistic practices, specifically: there is no way in Hell any of that made any kind of goddamn sense within a 50 to even 70 years timeframe, especially once again given the absence of semi-stable, centralised state institutions!
c) And then shit actually got offensive in places, because a lot of the book's 'cultural world-building', centring on its two 'player factions', the "Norse" and the "Celts" (no fucking way am I typing those without air quotes), relied on gross stereotypes and hand-waved away the fact these groupings were extrapolated from REAL, LIVING cultures with REAL, LAYERED histories! This is especially true when it comes to the book's... blegh, "Celts", or rather Irish, really (cuz I mean come on, it all fucking starts in Ireland, give me a break). I'm like: the Irish Troubles aren't exactly old history in the fucking slightest, in fact there are still, ongoing ramifications from this conflict affecting the socio-political situations of Ireland and the UK TODAY ! š¤¬
Now onto more specific examples of stuff that made me laugh, then nuked my immersion, then pissed me off:
a) The Finns and SĆ”mi were sometimes included in the grouping of "Norse", which made absolutely no sense. This wasnāt consistent though soā¦ problem with the bookās editing perhaps?
b) A big one that legit made me lose my mind for a hot second: two āNorseā characters laugh at the idea that whiskey translates to āWater of Lifeā in Irish (yes, it's IRISH, not Gaelic, the language is actually called IRISH in English, by Irish people in Ireland, my fucking god ā and it's Gaeilge in the language itself). And I was like: EXCUSE ME HWUT?! ... HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF AKVAVIT??????? Itās a spirit FROM SCANDINAVIA OMFG. And it LITERALLY MEANS WATER OF LIFE, because it comes from the Latin aqua vitae. And guess what? We have it in French too: EAU DE VIE!! It also exists in Slavic languages, LITERALLY TWO SECONDS OF GOOGLING WILL SHOW YOU THIS!!! This shit is borderline pan-European, so riddle me this: why the fuck would Scandinavia people find this weird or funny in the fucking slightest?! Tell me you know nothing about actual European cultures without telling me you know nothing about actual European cultures, or that you donāt know how to do your bloody research, at the very least!
c) Excerpt: āShe had thought it was so ridiculous at the time that the "Celts" didnāt just adhere to the same passage of time as the rest of the known world.ā Omg please KMN: AGAIN, why were these supposedly Scandinavian characters acting like peeps from the (relatively) neighbouring British Islands were fucking aliens?! Even from the asinine (and underbaked as fuck) āpseudo-neo-Paganā perspective the book chose to slap onto its ridiculous world-building: the Norse and Celtic calendars shouldn't be radically different, because again the vast majority of the cultures in Europe are somewhat related, gaaaah! Heck, even on a broader, global scale, youāll often find most cultures celebrate important events of the solar and/or agricultural calendar around the same time, because we're all goddamn humans! š¤¦āāļø
d) This then of course exposes the nonsensical religious world-building: āThey didnāt cannibalise people for their bonfire festivals as a ritual to please their gods." So youāre seriously telling me the Irish just all converted back to fucking druidic paganism in the span of, what, a hundred years AT MOST?! CATHOLIC IRELAND, REALLY?! I couldāve bought weird and colourful doomsday cults; I could've bought splinter neo-Druidic factions in conflict with majority Catholic and Protestant groups, but a BLANKET CONVERSION OF THE ISLAND OF IRELAND? THEN OF GREAT BRITAIN?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? And same goes for the "Norse", honestly, cuz like... whatever happened to all the Protestants in Scandinavia?! Come the fuck on!
e) āThe Cornish were still English and the English were still "Celts", last she had heard.ā This one is so clunky itās hilarious, actually. Additionally: the way 'linguistic hegemony' was described in the book also didnāt make a lick of sense. Cuz you're telling me all of Ireland just magically ditched English for Irish, then forced it on the UK... really!? ROFL. But then, other Celtic languages, such as Welsh, were also, at times, called āGaelicā, and I was likeā¦ hwut!? I'll be nice here and say there must have been an issue with the editing there ā I guess.
f) Another biggie: āI understand,ā she breathed. And she really did. It had been subtle at first, but she had started to notice the way the English were treated here, as second-class citizens, as traitors to their own people. It reminded her of the way the SĆ”mi, the Finns, and the Danes were sometimes treated in Mimameid."
Hoooo boy. š¤¦āāļø At best, the above reads as an edgy Irish-American teen's revenge fantasy played out in EU VI. At worst, unfortunately, and coming from a work of SF literature presumably penned by an adult, this is actually bordering on the offensive, given the way it, just, blatantly hand-waves away REAL history affecting REAL PEOPLE TO THIS DAY. IN WHAT UNIVERSE can you write, with a straight face, a story that equates the ENGLISH to the SĆMI, with THE IRISH as the OPPRESSING BADDIES. Just: what the actual ever loving fuck?!
And all the more so given the book also states the āCeltsā were 'particularly good at guerrilla warfareā¦ USING CAR BOMBS'. Fucking. Christ. š¤®
Then there was also a camp of "Celtic" peoples and they were all, or nearly all... you guessed it: REDHEADS! š¤¦āāļø AND WEARING COLOURFUL TARTAN - BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Like bestie, do you know the amount of fucking resources youād need to make brightly coloured tartan, in A POST-APOCALYPTIC SCENARIO? Where were all the fucking sheep and dye plants, then, huh? Cuz the book also made it pretty fucking clear most of the plants had gotten their shit kicked in by an ongoing volcanic winter. YOU CANT HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO WITH THIS STUFF, MY GOD! Coloured clan tartan is also SCOTTISH, not IRISH, as an FYI, for fuck's sake. And sure, Ireland does have the highest incidence (afaik) of gingers, but that incidence only amounts to about 10 percent, not 90 percent! And it's like 6%-8% in the UK... which sure is a lot compared to most other places on Earth, but it's NOT the majority! Like seriously: could one possibly write any more stereotypically????? š¤¬š¤®
Just: garbage. Ludicrous, and mildly offensive garbage.
Full video review: https://youtu.be/UvNiceyaA54.
Synopsis:
Set scene: near-future climate apocalypse + volcanic winterā¦ the Ulster Irish take over the Republic, presumably mass convert the nation to Neo-Druidry (rofl) and conquer the UK ā because this is a badly novelised EU IV campaign ā then do a āreverse-Viking' for shits nā giggles and go rampaging in Scandinavia for resources (but not, ya know, in the Netherlands? Belgium? Northern France? I mean itās all right there across the Channel but yaight). Some āNorseā folks in Scandinavia live in a (presumably) Asatru-dedicated techno-bunker and do shit.
Yes, please make sure to read all of the above with a very, and I do mean very heavy tone of sarcasm.
Review:
I always try and remain fair towards books, even when I thoroughly dislike them, so Iāll start by listing the very few positives I have to share about this one:
ā¢ The prose was fluid overall. There was good descriptive writing. The text itself read pretty quickly (thank goodness for that, I wouldnāt have made it to 52% otherwise). The dialogues were fine as well, from a structural andā¦ āthese humans sound humanā point of view at least.
ā¢ The āpost-apocalyptic techno-bunker societyā premise was decently intriguing on its own.
ā¢ As was the book's basic "weāre gonna do a 'reverse-Viking' with peeps from the Hiberno-British Islands" idea...
Alas! The execution of said basic idea was an abject, and I mean abject failure because the world-building needed to create solid, believable foundations for it to actually work was entirely missing. Yes, the world-building was hot garbage AND, it not only broke my immersion pretty quickly, it also read as mildly offensive, quite frankly!
The world-building, or why itās not okay to do this kind of shit with living cultures, including white European ones:
a) A lot of things did not make any sense from a strictly 'post-apocalyptic survival' point of view: access to certain kinds of resources that had previously been established to be rare, scorched-earth raiding tactics employed by people otherwise looking for viable land to settle (?!), cultural and linguistic take-overs that wouldn't make an iota of sense without the presence of a state governments... which had been established, in-text, to have collapsed, etc...
b) This major issue was further compounded by the fact I was basically given the impression the story took place in the near-future. Nothing specific was ever given in terms of dates, or broader timelines, but judging by the general level of tech people claimed they'd only just recently lost access to, Iād say the book's plot canāt have taken place more than one, maybe two generations at the absolute maximum from now. Concerning what the book stated regarding the shifts in religious and linguistic practices, specifically: there is no way in Hell any of that made any kind of goddamn sense within a 50 to even 70 years timeframe, especially once again given the absence of semi-stable, centralised state institutions!
c) And then shit actually got offensive in places, because a lot of the book's 'cultural world-building', centring on its two 'player factions', the "Norse" and the "Celts" (no fucking way am I typing those without air quotes), relied on gross stereotypes and hand-waved away the fact these groupings were extrapolated from REAL, LIVING cultures with REAL, LAYERED histories! This is especially true when it comes to the book's... blegh, "Celts", or rather Irish, really (cuz I mean come on, it all fucking starts in Ireland, give me a break). I'm like: the Irish Troubles aren't exactly old history in the fucking slightest, in fact there are still, ongoing ramifications from this conflict affecting the socio-political situations of Ireland and the UK TODAY ! š¤¬
Now onto more specific examples of stuff that made me laugh, then nuked my immersion, then pissed me off:
a) The Finns and SĆ”mi were sometimes included in the grouping of "Norse", which made absolutely no sense. This wasnāt consistent though soā¦ problem with the bookās editing perhaps?
b) A big one that legit made me lose my mind for a hot second: two āNorseā characters laugh at the idea that whiskey translates to āWater of Lifeā in Irish (yes, it's IRISH, not Gaelic, the language is actually called IRISH in English, by Irish people in Ireland, my fucking god ā and it's Gaeilge in the language itself). And I was like: EXCUSE ME HWUT?! ... HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF AKVAVIT??????? Itās a spirit FROM SCANDINAVIA OMFG. And it LITERALLY MEANS WATER OF LIFE, because it comes from the Latin aqua vitae. And guess what? We have it in French too: EAU DE VIE!! It also exists in Slavic languages, LITERALLY TWO SECONDS OF GOOGLING WILL SHOW YOU THIS!!! This shit is borderline pan-European, so riddle me this: why the fuck would Scandinavia people find this weird or funny in the fucking slightest?! Tell me you know nothing about actual European cultures without telling me you know nothing about actual European cultures, or that you donāt know how to do your bloody research, at the very least!
c) Excerpt: āShe had thought it was so ridiculous at the time that the "Celts" didnāt just adhere to the same passage of time as the rest of the known world.ā Omg please KMN: AGAIN, why were these supposedly Scandinavian characters acting like peeps from the (relatively) neighbouring British Islands were fucking aliens?! Even from the asinine (and underbaked as fuck) āpseudo-neo-Paganā perspective the book chose to slap onto its ridiculous world-building: the Norse and Celtic calendars shouldn't be radically different, because again the vast majority of the cultures in Europe are somewhat related, gaaaah! Heck, even on a broader, global scale, youāll often find most cultures celebrate important events of the solar and/or agricultural calendar around the same time, because we're all goddamn humans! š¤¦āāļø
d) This then of course exposes the nonsensical religious world-building: āThey didnāt cannibalise people for their bonfire festivals as a ritual to please their gods." So youāre seriously telling me the Irish just all converted back to fucking druidic paganism in the span of, what, a hundred years AT MOST?! CATHOLIC IRELAND, REALLY?! I couldāve bought weird and colourful doomsday cults; I could've bought splinter neo-Druidic factions in conflict with majority Catholic and Protestant groups, but a BLANKET CONVERSION OF THE ISLAND OF IRELAND? THEN OF GREAT BRITAIN?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? And same goes for the "Norse", honestly, cuz like... whatever happened to all the Protestants in Scandinavia?! Come the fuck on!
e) āThe Cornish were still English and the English were still "Celts", last she had heard.ā This one is so clunky itās hilarious, actually. Additionally: the way 'linguistic hegemony' was described in the book also didnāt make a lick of sense. Cuz you're telling me all of Ireland just magically ditched English for Irish, then forced it on the UK... really!? ROFL. But then, other Celtic languages, such as Welsh, were also, at times, called āGaelicā, and I was likeā¦ hwut!? I'll be nice here and say there must have been an issue with the editing there ā I guess.
f) Another biggie: āI understand,ā she breathed. And she really did. It had been subtle at first, but she had started to notice the way the English were treated here, as second-class citizens, as traitors to their own people. It reminded her of the way the SĆ”mi, the Finns, and the Danes were sometimes treated in Mimameid."
Hoooo boy. š¤¦āāļø At best, the above reads as an edgy Irish-American teen's revenge fantasy played out in EU VI. At worst, unfortunately, and coming from a work of SF literature presumably penned by an adult, this is actually bordering on the offensive, given the way it, just, blatantly hand-waves away REAL history affecting REAL PEOPLE TO THIS DAY. IN WHAT UNIVERSE can you write, with a straight face, a story that equates the ENGLISH to the SĆMI, with THE IRISH as the OPPRESSING BADDIES. Just: what the actual ever loving fuck?!
And all the more so given the book also states the āCeltsā were 'particularly good at guerrilla warfareā¦ USING CAR BOMBS'. Fucking. Christ. š¤®
Then there was also a camp of "Celtic" peoples and they were all, or nearly all... you guessed it: REDHEADS! š¤¦āāļø AND WEARING COLOURFUL TARTAN - BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Like bestie, do you know the amount of fucking resources youād need to make brightly coloured tartan, in A POST-APOCALYPTIC SCENARIO? Where were all the fucking sheep and dye plants, then, huh? Cuz the book also made it pretty fucking clear most of the plants had gotten their shit kicked in by an ongoing volcanic winter. YOU CANT HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO WITH THIS STUFF, MY GOD! Coloured clan tartan is also SCOTTISH, not IRISH, as an FYI, for fuck's sake. And sure, Ireland does have the highest incidence (afaik) of gingers, but that incidence only amounts to about 10 percent, not 90 percent! And it's like 6%-8% in the UK... which sure is a lot compared to most other places on Earth, but it's NOT the majority! Like seriously: could one possibly write any more stereotypically????? š¤¬š¤®
Just: garbage. Ludicrous, and mildly offensive garbage.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Xenophobia, Cultural appropriation
Gross Hibernophobia and stereotyping of real, living European cultures.