Theory Of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman

One thing I want to deal with up front: Many previous reviewers have expressed confusion over the cover. They don't understand why the covers look like romance novel covers. People--this is a romance novel! It has many of the romance novel tropes--the misunderstood and remote female protagonist who finds herself warming to a handsome man--the focus on bodies and bodily reactions--romance, definitely. There's more romance than speculative fiction here.

Events have caught up to this book--I am reading it six years after publication and her predictions are well on target. We have Bindis (actually glasses), we have AI-powered viruses, climate collapse proceeds apace. The social science speculation is interesting--our protagonist is particularly talented at teasing out and quantifying behavior that the participants would prefer to stay hidden, like married women having children by men who are not their husbands. She is also strongly and deliberately unlikeable due to her chronic pain, which she is just getting over at the time of the story. Kudos to the author for featuring endometriosis, it is a seriously misunderstood condition.

The bonobo behavior descriptions dominate the book, and they are fascinating. But there's a great big research no-no in this book--in real life, primate researchers do not enter the research enclosures or interact directly with the apes. This is for safety and for ethical reasons. Great ape research is done through voluntary interaction, but the plot turns on the protagonist specifically not allowing this privacy for the mating bonobos. So we have to assume this takes place in an alternate universe where these ethical and safety concerns do not exist. The plot would not work without the direct interaction of humans and bonobos. Such interaction definitely happens--people for whatever reason do raise great apes as part of their families. But research institutes of the sort described in this story would receive no government funding and would be shunned by the research community.

And of course we have the sexual tension between the protagonist and Stotts, the classically handsome male researcher. This is all described in standard romance novel fashion, and seems to have thrown a lot of readers off. It adds a weird twist to the book but is completely believable, a natural reaction to being in a stressful situation.

The setting for the heroes' journey through the aftermath of a sandstorm reminds me of the movie Interstellar. I loved how they began the movie with survivors of the Dust Bowl.

Not sure I would say I liked this story. But I am glad to have read it.

My Goodreads Review