Akiva Reads

by Rivers Solomon

[I'd give a content warning for this book, but tbh it would be longer than the review.]

I finished this a few days ago. I feel like I should have some smart thoughts about it, but I don't really, other than I thought it was very well done! It reminded me of Hunger Games for some reason, except the worldbuilding actually makes sense. What if I compared the two? (Though I have only read the books once, when they first came out, and not watched the movie, so I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.)

• Hunger Games centers on a media empire that keeps the privileged from understanding the humanity of people outside their bubble. Unkindness of Ghosts makes it clear that the media for the privileged that spins perspectives on events exists, but it's not a central preoccupation because lowdeckers aren't a target audience and mostly don't have access to it. I liked the mentions of underground media networks (newsletters, pirate radio) tha lowdeckers have invented, though it's not a focus of the story.

• Hunger Games, like a lot of other dystopian fiction, has people arbitrarily divided into classes with different jobs. Which, you know, is not completely incorrect as an assessment of our world. But it makes a lot more sense on a self-contained generation ship! The thing that really brings life to this tired-ass concept in Unkindness is:

1) real development of different cultures and languages between decks, which is one of my favorite sci fi tropes. I did wonder how many people are supposed to be on the Miranda---thousands is too small for this development, but could it be over a million with the architecture of the ship as explained? Different gender systems on different decks was a really lovely and interesting idea, but there's so much else going on that gender fuckery and queerness ends up being a background to everything else.

2) extensive exploration of how and when people move between decks. There's Aster, Theo, and the mid-deck medic in their roles tending to the different ailments of different classes. There's the chapter about Melusine forced into the 'mammy' role on a high deck. There's Aster and Theo as products of inter-deck relationships, and passing for different classes. There's passes and guards and confrontations even when you have the right pass, and wearing the right (or usually, wrong) clothes to blend in.

• Hunger Games explores trauma and PTSD. Unkindness does that, and also main characters living with neuroatypicality and chronic mental illness.

• Hunger Games is usually not explicit about race, and it's clumsy and binary black-and-white when it is. (Although I still think Katniss was subtextually nonwhite, but what do I know.) Unkindness is very, very explicit about race and racism and being mixed and passing and beauty standards and everything else.

• Both are about the mechanics and ugliness and violence of revolution. I don't remember enough about Hunger Games to comment further. Aster and others resisting in ways they know aren't, logically, a good idea because they're human beings reacting to violent oppression feels... yeah.

• Unkindness: queer queer lesbian queer gender nonconformity queer intersex queer alternate gender systems trans queer medical transition genderqueer queer queer queer aaaaaaa so good thank you

On a technical level, having almost the entire book from Aster's perspective except literally a handful of chapters from other characters exploring other views you wouldn't otherwise be able to see is... understandable, but clunky. I don't know if Solomon is done with this world, but I'd read more, and I'm excited to see what they write next.