An Unkindness of Ghosts

Executive Summary: This book is brutal and hard to read at times, but very well written and I ended up enjoying it far more than I expected to from the blurb alone.

Full Review
I hadn't heard of this book at all before it was chosen as the March pick for Sword & Laser. The blurb really didn't excite me, so I decided to borrow this from the library and ended up having my hold come in much earlier than I'd planned.

The first few chapters didn't really pull me in. Aster is an oppressed “lower deck” woman who seems to have some kind of background in medicine/healing. Everything changed for me a few chapters in when we discover there is some sort of mystery surrounding the suicide of Aster's mother.

To me the mystery aspect of this book was the most interesting/intriguing. I think if that part had been included in the book blurb (goodreads has an extra paragraph that hints a bit at the mystery that my copy of the book didn't have on the back) I might have been interested in reading it beforehand.

I found the characters well-developed, and extremely complex. These are people who have been forced to suffer a great deal. Some of the characters are broken. Likely all of them are to some degree. Aster seems able to rise above it most of the time, but even she is not immune.

The world-building was pretty interesting too. The story takes place on a generation-ship, with a rigid class system. We learn some more about the ship as it goes on, but the finer details never really come. It's largely a character-driven story.

The oppression aspects make this hard to read. It is very reflective of the ways in which minorities have long been treated. The abuse, the demeaning behavior, and all around atrocities are hard to stomach. They should be though. This is the horrible kind of behavior humans, especially those of privilege have been doing for centuries to those who happen to be born into a “lower” class.

I generally read to escape. Things aren't exactly very happy right now. That made this book very hard to read at times. However the mystery that Aster was investigating really sucked me in.

It's also so well written that it was less off-putting to me as it might have otherwise been. It's quite an impressive debut novel from Rivers Solomon.

There are some circles out there who are angry at this type of Science-Fiction because it holds up a mirror and if they are being honest they don't like what they see reflected back at them. I'm not one of those people, but I generally don't go out of my way to read this sort of thing.

I'm glad this was picked because I think it's important to get uncomfortable at a book like this because it can be so close to non-fiction at times. I will definitely be more interested in picking up Rivers Solomon's next book as a result.