An Unkindness of Ghosts

Starred review from August 14, 2017
Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine. On the generational starship Matilda, which will take hundreds of years to reach its destination despite traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, a tech-ignorant white supremacy cult called the Sovereignty runs on the labor and intimidation of a black enslaved class. This is worldbuilding by poetry; hard science fiction fans may look in vain for some of the elements they expect from a generation ship story, as the narrative instead relies on many layers of metaphor. Aster Grey, orphaned from birth and raised in slavery on deck Q, teaches herself medicine and much more. She discovers that notes handed down by her mother are encoded and may map the Sovereignty’s fatal weakness, but as the notes become shuffled, divided, damaged, and destroyed, it’s unclear whether Aster can ever fully decode them. Neuroatypical Aster is literal and unsparing as she examines her precarious life and flawed environment; she accepts the horrors of objective reality but struggles passionately with the allusions and evasions of human interaction. Solomon packs so many conflicts—chiefly concerning race, gender, and faith, but also patriarchy, education, mental illness, abortion, and more—into a relatively brief space that the story momentarily strains here and there to contain everything. The overall achievement, however, is stunning. Agent: Laura Zats, Red Sofa Literary.

September 1, 2017
The HSS Matilda is a massive spaceship that has carried a small contingent of humanity for many years away from a destroyed Earth and toward a hazy vision of a promised land. Over generations, the ship's decks have become harshly segregated by race and prosperity, and the corrupt leadership of the upper decks has imposed increasingly cruel rules, restrictions, and forced labor on the darker-skinned residents of the lower decks. Aster is an angry and strange young woman of the lower decks who struggles with deeply rooted anger and sadness but also provides medical care to her shipmates with great skill and compassion. When the ship's sovereign falls ill and Aster's friend and mentor, the Surgeon General Theo Smith--a member of the leadership class--asks for her help with his treatment, Aster finds herself thrown into the investigation of a personal mystery that is deeply entwined with the fate of the ship. A seemingly inexplicable link between the sovereign's illness and her mother's suicide 25 years earlier sends Aster on a dangerous search for answers that threatens to upend her understanding of herself, fuel an uprising, and open up the never imagined possibility of escape. Solomon's characters are solid and easily likable, even when their more abrasive qualities and lack of self-reflection add exasperating misunderstandings to the plot. The HSS Matilda is a well-crafted world, and while the tyrannical regime of its leadership feels like a familiar dystopic trope, the diversity of the people who inhabit it--their various sexual and gender identities, physical abilities, and psychological burdens--is refreshingly visible and vital even as they face brutal discrimination for their differences. An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society's assumptions.

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August 1, 2017
Some 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity fled a dying planet on the spaceship Matilda. The ship-bound colony, led by a group of brutal zealots, is divided along racial lines, with those of darker skin performing the majority of the labor under a ruthless police state. Aster is the Surgeon's assistant, daughter of a missing mother, distinct from her cohort due to her intelligence and atypical behavior. She has spent her life in the margins, surviving the vicious existence common to lower-deck life and fostering her rage. When Aster discovers a connection between the death of Matilda's ruler and the presumed suicide of her mother 25 years earlier, she begins to see a greater pattern that might lead to liberation. In this debut, Solomon uses the generation ship as a setting to explore race, disability, family, sexuality, and the way humans are haunted by the ghosts of the past. The book is told primarily from Aster's point of view, and we also get glimpses from the characters closest to her. Infused with the spirit of Octavia Butler and loaded with meaning for the present day, An Unkindness of Ghosts will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Solomon's impassioned, speculative, literary book is sorely needed on library shelves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 15, 2017

Life aboard the generation ship Matilda is difficult for those in the lower decks. Most spend long days performing back-breaking labor on the field decks, maintaining the crops illuminated by the interior sun they call "baby." Aster has a brilliant mind, but the color of her skin and the deck of her birth keep her from sharing her talents for making medicines with anyone but her fellow lower deckers. Those talents, however, have also brought her to the attention of the ship's surgeon Theo, who tries to help Aster when he can. The impending death of the current sovereign and the cruelty of his heir prompt Aster to attempt to change the social order of Matilda's oppressive regime. VERDICT Harrowing and beautiful, this is sf at its best: showing the possible future but warning of the danger of bringing old prejudices and cruelties to that new world. While a story about enslaved people in space could be a one-note polemic, the fully rounded characters bring nuance and genuine pathos to this amazing debut.--MM

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