Jeff VanderMeer as an author takes some getting used to. His books are very dark, with a lot of inevitable degradation and characters struggling through deeply depressing and weird settings. I came to appreciate the Southern Reach trilogy and had some hopes for this one. And they were somewhat fulfilled.
Jane Smith, the oversize security consultant, is an unreliable narrator and unlikeable protagonist. Reading those books can be a brutal experience, though they also give space to be really great. Can't say this quite makes it. But I found her to be a very interesting person, a basically brutal woman (with reasons for her brutality) moving through a brutal world. She sometimes tries to care for others (like her assistant or her daughter) but doesn't really have her heart in it. Why she fixates on Silvina the climate terrorist (and savior maybe?) is not too clear--it doesn't relate to her work or life, though her relation of the news shows she is concerned. Maybe that was supposed to be enough.The world of this book is pretty much ours, and very foreseeably dystopian. I think this might have been a mistake, making this basically an extrapolation of our world and simplifying some of the deep Weirdness of the shroom books and Southern Reach. It is more accessible, but the motivations still don't quite make enough sense to drive all this. And yet, given what is happening, her actions make a lot of sense.
Hard to say I enjoyed this book, but it really did engage me. With a little more "why" for Jane personally it would have worked for me.
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