A review by eggcatsreads
Down in the Sea of Angels by Khan Wong

1.75

A story told in three separate timelines - 1906, 2006, 2106 - with a psychic connection to a jade teacup binding all of them together. 

I’ll be honest - this book did not work for me. Personally, I felt like the connection between the three timelines to be…tentative at best, and at no point did it feel like there was an actual reason for all three people to be connected through time. While reading this, I wound up wanting full books on both Maida and Li Nuan’s lives, as opposed to the small glances we were given. By breaking up this book into their three separate lives, instead of one entire story, I felt like I was given the sparknotes of three different ones. I was even explaining the plot of this book to my mom, and with only about 100 pages left could still not come up with a reason for the connection between these people - or how it was necessary to help a single one of them. 

Maida has the psychic ability to connect to objects and see their pasts, and by doing so sees a brief glimpse into the lives of both Nathan and Li Nuan. She also discovers a plot to capture and control everyone else like her in their futuristic world. Li Nuan is a trafficked 16 year old girl in the slums of Chinatown, desperate for escape and freedom. And Nathan…is a grown man who somehow just discovered that child exploitation, labor and slavery is a thing in the tech world, and has a crisis of conscience. 

Clearly, two of these stories had a stronger connection to me than the third. It was just a bit difficult to read about the real life abuses and dangers suffered by these two women, only to have a chapter where this man complains about the horrors of society. I’m sorry but I just didn’t care about Nathan and found his chapters to be tedious and boring, at best. 

Also, much of this book is written with a more YA feel, and - while there were trigger warnings for the sexual abuse Li Nuan would suffer - I felt it was a bit more graphic at times than was entirely necessary, or went into more detail than I felt was needed to understand her story. There is one scene in particular that I felt went into more detail than I needed to understand her sexual abuse, as well as another scene that I didn’t find necessary at all other to have her be abused another time. And with the whiplash of her chapters as opposed to the “party at Burning Man and then suddenly become aware of capitalism” Nathan and “anxious at her new job and then forced to become an agent to save her kind” Maida felt extremely out of place. I strongly believe her chapters could have been toned down to still tell her sexual abuses but to not make them so violent and triggering, while not losing any of the horror of them. 

This book has a huge theme on limiting harm and trying for the best, but in many ways it doesn’t work with the rest of the novel. With a societal collapse that happened before the events of this novel started in 2106, despite the theme of “time is circular, not linear” it doesn’t exactly work. The book itself even mentions how Li Nuan can’t really do anything to help prevent the apocalypse and so she just tries to do her best where she’s at, and Nathan can only do so much to try to mitigate his carbon footprint. We know how the story ends because we’re currently in the future!

Also, so much of this novel in the futuristic “utopia” world present in 2106 involved Maida saying disparaging things about those who do not help in some way to “clean up the mess” left by the Precursors (people present before the collapse).

‘Service at these centers was compulsory - a minimum of two days a month for the residents of the Administrative Regions.’

‘...anyone who worked more than their compulsory earned luxury credits.’

‘Those of us who were not giant assholes dedicated some of our time to clean up the mess.’

One thing I kept thinking of while reading that was never mentioned or acknowledged, was how do disabled people fit into this model of “everyone needs to work to get basic necessities”? While the knowledge that in this utopia things like food, basic clothing, and housing are provided - but they are provided by “contributing” which…isn’t much better than how capitalism works currently. It was even mentioned that her living quarters are provided by the job she is doing, which - in my honest opinion - sounded a lot like company towns and like having these benefits are only provided to those who can do the work for them. How does this utopia provide for those who cannot do those jobs, who cannot “dedicate some time to clean up the mess” not because they are “a giant asshole” but because their body doesn’t allow them to do so? Not to mention that the way to gain luxuries was to do even more work than the bare minimum required, so do…disabled people then just not deserve things like nice clothes or alcohol? 

This is partially what I mean when I say I’d have liked entire stories about these broken-up pieces of novels. Li Nuan’s story is barely fleshed out, with a strange focus on her sexual abuses while Maida’s doesn’t go into the worldbuilding and instead very quickly exposes the political corruption trying to imprison them. Reading about the issues they’ve been facing felt much more like a SparkNotes version of their story, as opposed to everything that was provided. (And don’t get me started on Nathan’s story focusing way too much on whatever party they were doing in the desert and the fact that I simply. Did not care one iota. About it. Or him.)

Also, this is a spoiler without actually spoiling anything, but the whale thing was too weird and should’ve been taken out. 

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Angry Robot for providing this copy for review.