abookishtype 's review for:

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

3.0

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Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City is a delightful blend of noir and contemporary fantasy, set in exotic Johannesburg, South Africa. As soon as I read the first chapter, I was hooked. It was so good I read it in less than a day. There’s a lot going on in this story. There’s a killer mystery and an interesting premise (that I’ll get to in a second). But what makes this book is its atmosphere. Without beating the reader over the head with details, you get a sense of the rickety, crime ridden tenements where the main character spends most of her time so so strong that you can almost smell the stink of it. The dialogue is peppered with Afrikaans and several African languages and the cast is wildly diverse. I tip my metaphorical hat to Beukes’s skill as a writer...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.