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A review by brogan7
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
3.0
This is a strange little book, a gem of ideas but perhaps not as fully realized as it could have been.
Set in the indefinite future, the book depicts a colony of humans, a girl who is accepted to "university" in a part of the city that has sheltered itself from the ravages of climate change and poverty. She has a hereditary disease that is increasingly more common and that has odd, variable effects, some of them psychological.
The story rollicks along, there is always something happening, but sometimes the action changes are so fast, it's hard to keep up with the rhythm of it.
The disease is supposed to kill people very painfully in some cases, and the author describes one of the effects being that people lose their voice from screaming in pain. I thought this was a really strange description, actually, because it doesn't seem like a likely symptom, or the part that one would worry about. It sounds more like an author trying to be superlative about a situation she's just barely imagining--she's trying to make it sound bad--but it comes off as not believable.
I wonder why the narrative was so rushed (just a slim little book--it could have taken more room to find suitable pacing) and why some ideas were just grafted on there (like the sexual interest between the two main characters, which feels tacked on and then just not...on point, emotionally).
In the end I was disappointed in this book, which skirted around some interesting issues (loyalty, separation, dreams, what "away" can bring that "here" cannot, and what the privileged have done to insulate themselves from the consequences of their choices and privilege)--but she doesn't actually go there... So while the book makes gestures towards what it wants to say about privilege and oppression, it doesn't actually show anything about that, other than that it's a notion, that there are some fictional "haves" to the "have-nots"...but in fact we don't know at all what the "have" world could offer the "have-not."
Strangely, it feels like the more awful things happen in this book, without any feeling of actual danger or caring that the outcome could truly be terrible for individual characters, the more the book tells of another kind of privilege: the privilege of not knowing suffering, not understanding loss, wanting to be entertained by it as "action" as opposed to...open emotionally to it. (What was the POINT of the whole animal hunt scene?)
Set in the indefinite future, the book depicts a colony of humans, a girl who is accepted to "university" in a part of the city that has sheltered itself from the ravages of climate change and poverty. She has a hereditary disease that is increasingly more common and that has odd, variable effects, some of them psychological.
The story rollicks along, there is always something happening, but sometimes the action changes are so fast, it's hard to keep up with the rhythm of it.
The disease is supposed to kill people very painfully in some cases, and the author describes one of the effects being that people lose their voice from screaming in pain. I thought this was a really strange description, actually, because it doesn't seem like a likely symptom, or the part that one would worry about. It sounds more like an author trying to be superlative about a situation she's just barely imagining--she's trying to make it sound bad--but it comes off as not believable.
I wonder why the narrative was so rushed (just a slim little book--it could have taken more room to find suitable pacing) and why some ideas were just grafted on there (like the sexual interest between the two main characters, which feels tacked on and then just not...on point, emotionally).
In the end I was disappointed in this book, which skirted around some interesting issues (loyalty, separation, dreams, what "away" can bring that "here" cannot, and what the privileged have done to insulate themselves from the consequences of their choices and privilege)--but she doesn't actually go there... So while the book makes gestures towards what it wants to say about privilege and oppression, it doesn't actually show anything about that, other than that it's a notion, that there are some fictional "haves" to the "have-nots"...but in fact we don't know at all what the "have" world could offer the "have-not."
Strangely, it feels like the more awful things happen in this book, without any feeling of actual danger or caring that the outcome could truly be terrible for individual characters, the more the book tells of another kind of privilege: the privilege of not knowing suffering, not understanding loss, wanting to be entertained by it as "action" as opposed to...open emotionally to it. (What was the POINT of the whole animal hunt scene?)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore
Animal hunt