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    An Unkindness of Ghosts
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    An Unkindness of Ghosts
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    An Unkindness of Ghosts
    Ebook385 pages6 hours

    An Unkindness of Ghosts

    By Rivers Solomon

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the past decade, selected by NPR

    One of the 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time, selected by Esquire

    One of the 100 Most Influential Queer Books of All Time, selected by Booklist

    A Best Book of 2017: NPR, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bustle, Bookish, Barnes & Noble, Chicago Public Library, Book Scrolling.

    CLMP Firecracker Award Winner

    A Stonewall Book Award Honor Book

    Finalist for the 2018 Locus Award, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Lambda Literary Award.

    Nominated for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Novel

    "What Solomon achieves with this debut--the sharpness, the depth, the precision--puts me in mind of a syringe full of stars. I want to say about this book, its only imperfection is that it ended. But that might give the wrong impression: that it is a happy book, a book that makes a body feel good. It is not a happy book. I love it like I love food, I love it for what it did to me, I love it for having made me feel stronger and more sure in a nightmare world, but it is not a happy book. It is an antidote to poison. It is inoculation against pervasive, enduring disease. Like a vaccine, it is briefly painful, leaves a lingering soreness, but armors you from the inside out."
    --NPR

    "In Rivers Solomon's highly imaginative sci-fi novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, eccentric Aster was born into slavery on--and is trying to escape from--a brutally segregated spaceship that for generations has been trying to escort the last humans from a dying planet to a Promised Land. When she discovers clues about the circumstances of her mother's death, she also comes closer to disturbing truths about the ship and its journey."
    --BuzzFeed

    "What Solomon does brilliantly in this novel is in the creation of a society in which dichotomies loom over certain aspects of the narrative, and are eschewed by others...Hearkening back to the past in visions of the future can hold a number of narrative purposes...The past offers us countless nightmares and cautionary tales; so too, I'm afraid, can the array of possible futures lurking up ahead."
    --Tor.com

    "This book is a clear descendent of Octavia Butler's Black science fiction legacy, but grounded in more explicit queerness and neuroatypicality."
    --AutoStraddle

    "Ghosts are 'the past refusing to be forgot,' says a character in this assured science-fiction debut. That's certainly the case aboard the HSS Matilda, a massive spacecraft arranged along the cruel racial divides of pre-Civil War America."
    --Toronto Star

    Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.

    Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateSep 18, 2017
    ISBN9781617755996
    Unavailable
    An Unkindness of Ghosts
    Author

    Rivers Solomon

    Rivers Solomon graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently live in Cambridge, England, with their family. An Unkindness of Ghosts is their debut.

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    Reviews for An Unkindness of Ghosts

    4/5

    396 ratings32 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved the character of Aster so much, and I don't even know why. Both the plot and the characters are rich, making this close to the best take on a generation ship that I've ever read.
    • 4/5
      This is a very good debut novel about a generational space ship and its inhabitants.
    • 5/5
      Rivers Solomon has written an intriguing, violent, thoughtful, unique piece of science fiction in An Unkindness of Ghosts. Does it all hang together in the end? Maybe not. Is it entirely worth reading and thinking about? Absolutely!Matilda is a thousand years into a space voyage with a world of inhabitants in search of a new planetary home. Its original theocracy has been corrupted by the sovereign rulers into a tightly stratified social system with the powerful living in luxury on the upper decks and the sustaining slaves in the cold and filth of the lower decks and the fields.Aster is a field hand and also a brilliant developer and synthesizer of medicines. Her brilliant mother is dead, a suicide, and the book begins with Aster's attempts to learn what her mother knew and how she died. She is aided or sometimes hindered by her mad friend Giselle, her aunt Melusine, and the Surgeon General of the whole ship, Theo. I confess that after a hundred pages or so, I stopped trying to follow explanations of how things worked and sometimes of how Aster thought, and just hung on for the ride. Many thanks to Early Reviewers for the opportunity to read this one now. I'll be waiting for whatever Rivers Solomon chooses to publish next.
    • 4/5
      What an intriguing setting Solomon has created--a self-sustaining space ship big enough to be a world. Not quite post-apocalyptic, since the action takes place off Earth, but with a hint of cellular memory of that world. Aster, in our time, would be labelled autistic, but in this time and place she is just another field hand with the intelligence and focused attention to learn medicine, math and science. The first half of the book carried me along before I was interrupted, but then (perhaps due to a lack of time to read large portions) I became more aware of what didn't mesh. A lack of time clues to explain how Aster could be active following scenes in which she was severely injured. A chapter, when she is in the middle of frantically trying to accomplish something, spent remembering some of her history. Aster, the consummate loner, mentioning people that are unimportant to the storyline. Reciting the names of different living spaces she passes thru, the earth-referenced names being little more than a display of the author's creativity in naming.It is disturbing. I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure how to classify this.Don't pin your expectations on the jacket description. I don't feel this was "organized like the antebellum South" more than any other dictatorship. The "leaders imposed harsh" indignities and religious cant but were morally indifferent about the lives of the field hands. I kept waiting for hints of the "civil war" Aster was supposedly seeding, but that happened incidental to playing out her own sense of inevitability and responsibility for those who were harmed due to her actions.I was reading this aloud to my son, but there was more and more violence and graphic crudities which I had to try to edit out. Not recommended for younger children. I feel like the violence was gratuitous--not on the part of the story, but on the part of the characters themselves and the story just related the events.It definitely felt like Solomon was casting out her own ghosts in this writing. This is a book to tear open your guts, not to sugarcoat the ways lives are destructed.Review based on a free reader's advance copy.
    • 5/5
      Librarything early reviewer copy. Five stars.This is a fantastic debut novel. Several hundred years in the past a starship left Earth fleeing an unnamed disaster. The Matilda is hurtling through space towards an unknown destination. All of humanities foibles were also loaded and unleashed with sadly predictable results - a caste system of labor, brutal overloads, sexual and racial violence. From this setting a self-described neuroatypical autodidact haunts the ship's libraries and her own complicated familial history while seeking to exist on her own terms. Like all great science fiction, this novel works as both a great story and chilling description of the world we inhabit. This novel will make you ache as you race to finish it, fearing the ending you expect.
    • 4/5
      On the generation ship Matilda, on a centuries-long journey that seems to be going nowhere, the dark-skinned inhabitants of the lower decks are oppressed and impoverished, forced to labor for the rich, light-skinned upper-deckers. (Any resemblance to actual history here is surely not remotely coincidental.)It's hard for me to know quite how to review this one, because it sort of feels to me like a really good novel and kind of a meh one smooshed inextricably into each other. On the good side, the social commentary is decent, there are a few nicely imaginative world-building touches, and there are quite a few moments where I found the story or the writing or the characters really compelling.The less satisfying aspects, though, are harder to articulate. Mostly, lots and lots of the details just failed to feel convincing to me, in a way that kept me from ever feeling fully immersed in this world. And the plot... Well, the plot, which involves the main character searching for secrets left behind by her mother, sort of stutters and splutters along, skipping over much of what seems to be the actual plot part of the plot. And I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the end, but I think I was hoping for something a bit, well, more.It was an interesting reading experience, and it does some things I think are very much worth doing. I just wish I liked it more unreservedly than I did.
    • 5/5
      A great story builds a world that the reader wants to inhabit. A great science fiction story builds an entire universe. That is exactly what Rivers Solomon has done here. The universe that Aster lives in is bound by the space she and all other humans live on as it travels through space to an unknown Promised Land. Aster's Matlida is a combination of today's urban centers and the antebellium South, where how you live depends very much on where you live. This is not an easy book to read for the very reason why it is a book that everyone should read. Aster is a freak and an outsider. She is also a child looking for her mother and a woman wise beyond her years. She may be a 'monster', but she is very, very human. Through Aster's eye we see the worst that humanity can impose upon itself and we feel the hope and love that can redeem us all. This is a book that you will want to read many times and will be talked about for years to come.
    • 4/5
      Recommended for readers of Octavia Butler. This novel is simultaneously science fiction in the future and historical fiction of the slave-holding American South. While there are some elements of this book that drag -- probably related to the fact that this is a first novel with some associated pacing issues; nothing that makes this unreadable -- it's a very engaging read that makes you consider how history and religion bear on society well into the future.
    • 4/5
      The world building in this novel is great - the sense of the ship and the interactions between its inhabitants were all so real. I loved Aster and admired her and was heartbroken over all the ugliness in her world. This book isn't an easy one to read but it makes the reader think about what it means to be human and how divisions give us excuses to treat each other so cruelly.
    • 5/5
      Incredible, relevant, harrowing and fascinating, this is the story of a young woman in the low class of a brutally stratified generation ship. Her search for clues to her mother's death lead her to discover some difficult truths about the ship's voyage. Aster's voice is so solid, her experiences read as tangible, every surface and texture feel real both physically and emotionally. Readers of dystopias that explore race, gender, disability, sexuality, and class will not want to miss this one. It will sit on my shelf by my Butler, Jemisin, Le Guin, Okorafor, Leckie. One of the most human explorations of the possibilities of our repressive future and the hope for hard-won rebellion I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      A wonderfully written story. Able to bring to life every detail in the book.
    • 5/5
      This book was unlike anything I've ever read. I cannot recommend it enough. It's not an easy read, but it's a worthwhile one nonetheless. I'm in awe.
    • 4/5
      I think this book is worth a read from almost anyone. I'm still processing but I truly think it merits several re-reads and copious annotation.
    • 5/5
      An amazing debut. I loved being in Aster's head-- I'd say this is the first autistic protagonist I've read where the point of view felt real. I loved her matter-of-factness about the people around her, their quirks and foibles and smells and body hair. I loved her complex relationship with Giselle. I loved, loved, loved the depth of characterization Solomon gave to all the people in Aster's world. I loved that Solomon's black female characters were so many things women (particularly women of color) are told they shouldn't be: trans, genderqueer, angry, unmaternal, bipolar, lesbian, mathematicians, bisexual, asexual, disabled, autistic, vengeful, brilliant, hairy...

      I also deeply appreciated how the violence in the book, including sexual violence, is never sensationalized or gratuitous-- in fact, we often don't see the violent acts themselves, as Solomon focuses more on how Aster and the others cope with it in the moment and afterward. Other writers looking for how to approach violence honestly, without exploitation or sensationalism, should take note of how Solomon does it.

      Just loved it.
    • 4/5
      A ship carrying the last remnants of Earth through space, just hoping they find a habitable planet. The story follows a girl in a ship that has separated the floors by social structure. People on lower levels are treated poorly, which includes the main protagonist. The main protagonist is on a mission to find out what happened to her mother, She is a well written character, that has a lot of struggle with the supporting characters. It is a very good book. The only issue is at sometimes the book instills urgency, only for there to be none shown by the characters.
    • 5/5
      TW: Sexual assault, violence, suicideAn Unkindness of Ghosts is easily one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read all year. It’s a powerful book that would appeal to fans of Kameron Hurley and Octavia Butler.An Unkindness of Ghosts is set aboard the HSS Matilda, a generation ship that’s been sailing through space for three hundred years. The ship’s strictly divided along class, race, and gender lines, with the upper decks exerting an authoritarian control over the lower decks. The lowest of the decks are forced to labor in the fields, dealt arbitrary and harsh punishments from armed guards, and suffer a myriad of other abuses. In short, it’s a generation ship where the divide between first class and steerage resemble the antebellum South.Aster is a lower deck woman. She’s forced to labor in the fields like everyone else, but she’s also been able to gain enough of an education to act as a doctor for the others in the lower decks. When her friend Theo, the ship’s Surgeon, brings news to her that Matilda’s sovereign is dying, Aster bids him good riddance. Except, the man due to replace him as supreme ruler is somehow even worse, and the sickness that’s destroying him bears an uncanny resemblance to the writings of Aster’s dead mother, a suicide from twenty-five years ago. Aster always assumed that her mother was going mad, but her notes hint that she figured out one of Matilda’s secrets, a secret that might offer hope for Aster and all the others brutalized by Matilda's oppressive systems of power.First off, this book is incredibly diverse. The cast includes queer characters, characters who are neurodivergent or mentally ill, and characters of color. Aster’s black, intersex, and autistic. Her friend and mentor Theo is nonbinary and disabled. Her best friend is mentally ill. The woman who raised her is aro ace. These characters are the protagonists and most major supporting character. While the focus is mainly on Aster, the other three all receive sections from their first person point of view. At first I thought these sections were out of place, but by the end I came to appreciate them for how they expanded our knowledge of the characters.Different parts of the ship have different notions and concepts regarding gender. One level refers to all children with “they/them” pronouns. Another level assumes everyone’s a woman, unless they say otherwise. Additionally, intersex individuals are common on the lower decks, which generally blur the gender binary. In the upper decks, a rigid heteronormative, patriarchal, gender binary is strictly enforced, and they try to force the lower decks into their views of how gender “should” be. Before the time span of the book, there was apparently also a breeding program, and abortion remains illegal. It happens anyway, only under threat from the authorities.The back blurb calls the people of the lower decks sharecroppers. I don’t think that’s true — I think they’re slaves. While they may not be owned by any one individual, they are treated as property, from beatings and rapes to being locked in a box for days on end or having their children taken from them. An Unkindness of Ghosts delves deeply into the reaction that this constant trauma can have on the victims, but it doesn’t revel in the violations. Many of the worst physical sufferings are only alluded to, or the results of the violence are shown, not the violence itself.As horrific as it is, I can see how the world of the Matilda could grow from present day America. My guess is that it would start with the linking of economic and racial disparities, with the steerage class being disproportionately black compared to the first class passengers. And given three hundred years in a closed system, those disparities more and more reflect America’s dark history when it comes to race.In this brutal system, Aster is a woman with very little power. She has her sharp intellect, but she’s often at the mercy of those more powerful than her. An Unkindness of Ghosts is largely the story of Aster fighting for what agency she can and managing to survive in an intolerable situation. And eventually, the revelations of her mother’s journals offer hope.An Unkindness of Ghosts has a slow start. It doesn’t begin with guns blazing or any action packed scenes, but when I got into it, I really got into it. By the end, I had trouble putting this book down. I would still say that it’s a slower paced novel, more focused on the characters and their relationships than machinations of the plot.An Unkindness of Ghosts is a seriously impressive debut novel. Thoughtful and riveting, this is not a book I will ever forget, and I’ll be watching eagerly to see what Rivers Solomon does in the future.I don’t know what else to say. Please, do yourself and the world a favor by reading this book.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.I received an ARC of this book in exchange for a free and honest review.
    • 4/5
      Really good, especially for a debut novel. If you are looking for representation in your SF, look no further: queer, mentally ill, disabled, autism spectrum, gender-nonconforming, and tons of characters of colour are all on the page. It's a fight-against-the-system story, too. There are times when it feels a bit heavy-handed, and there's a some squicky body horror type stuff, which I don't deal well with, but this is definitely still well worth the read.
    • 3/5
      The starship Matilda is journeying through space. The comfortable life of the citizens of her upper decks is built on the labour of many slaves in the lower decks. The strength of the book lies in its unusual and strongly drawn characters. Aster is a lower deck slave, but also a... well, one of the great interests of the book is it is very show-don't-tell with the characters. Aster is extremely skilled at medicine and languages. She was a very late developer in her speech. She has her own literal view and idiosyncratic language. She doesn't like eye contact. Theo is the powerful nephew of the ship's tyrant, religious and effeminate, kind, conflict avoidant and skilled. And Giselle... Giselle is Aster's childhood friend, deeply broken by the sufferings she has been through in her life. It is hard not to judge her harshly for the things she does, and yet hard not to be sympathetic towards her and strongly root for her, despite her being superficially very unlikable. Much of the book's story is Aster's search for information about her mother, tangled up with the quest for information about where the ship is going and how they can ever find home. I found the resolution of this surprising, and hadn't seen the twist coming!
    • 5/5
      This book is intense. The worldbuilding is super-strong in relentlessly creating a society where some people have freedom and resources and rights, and others do not. As a generation-ship setting it works really well. I love the characters of Theo and Aster. The ending was satisfying without being too neat. And this is all the more impressive for being the author's first novel! Looking forward to more by them in the future.
    • 5/5
      I think amazing is the right word for this. I can't say that I liked it -- reading it felt like embracing trauma -- the horrors of everyday life on the ship are legion, are unending, are maddening and revolting. It feels important to read though, important to acknowledge that these are realities in our history, and these are realities in our present day, and it's something, at least, to celebrate Aster - unique, neurodivergent, genderqueer, survivor, as the hero and the fulcrum of the story.
    • 4/5
      Astar is a Q-decker living on the ship Matilda. Her mother passed away the day she was born, and she has spent her life being raised by her Aint Melusine. Astar is not your typical person, she finds it hard to express her words and does not seem to understand human relations. She much prefers to spend her time in her secret botanarium or helping the Surgeon. Life, as she knows, becomes dramatically different once Sovereign Nicolas dies and the Lieutenant is named the new Sovereign. She is hell bent on following her mother’s writings and finding a way off Matilda back to earth. This was such a beautifully written story. I found the second time reading it there was much I missed the first time. It was nice to read a novel with a character like Astar. Someone not the normal protagonist, but still very compelling. The topics of class struggle, sextual assault, and gender identity were weaved in seamlessly. All-important topics, but discussed in such a way that one did not feel overpowered by it. It was a great debut novel and I look forward to reading more by this author. 2019 Read Harder Challenge Prompt: A book by an AOC set in or about space
    • 2/5
      I found this very unpleasant.

      Solomon uses a style that reminded me a lot of when I read Beloved, though that was many years ago and I did my best to forget the experience at the time. It's very visceral, and it's a very personal choice for me to hate it, but I do.

      I also despised most of the characters. I accept hating the ruling class - that part is pretty common in fantasy, but when nobody is redeemable I get real tired, real quick. I found Giselle and Ainy pretty detestable, and Aster was intentionally hard to relate to due to her neurodivergency (might be using the wrong word there).

      As far as non-deliberate problems, I felt the worldbuilding was pretty weak. I also thought Aster's life, especially in the first 60% or so, was very schizophrenic and didn't fit together very well. I despised the other POVs at the beginning of every act.

      I'm giving it two stars because I know a lot of the unpleasantness was intentional, but I can't say this was an enjoyable read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This science fiction novel takes place in a far human future, aboard a generation ship that has already been traveling for several hundred years, and still human beings subjugate, abuse, and marginalize people of darker skin. Some have said that the circumstances of the novel echo the Antebellum South, which is true, but attentive readers will find much that echoes our current American conflicts as well. The ways in which cultures evolve, and their language evolves with them, get acknowledged early on in the novel; the decks of the great ship are culturally divided, divisions which have advanced over hundreds of years as linguistic differences have grown within the insular spaces of individual decks and wings, just as they have done in regions and countries. Solomon asks us to pay attention to those cultural markers, especially the significance of language, as we follow our protagonist through the mystery of her mother's earlier death and her own navigation through the rigid social boundaries on the ship itself. Aster, the focal character of the book, has her own way of speaking but also code-switches as she moves from deck to deck and culture to culture, out of necessity as well as identity. She is a fascinating character; in today's world, she might have been classified as somewhere on some spectrum, but in her world she is simply unique, for better or for worse. Aster is a doctor and a scientist, but officially she is merely a field hand, because of her skin tone. The ways in which she chafes against the roles that others force on her resonates, as does her eventual rejection of those imposed limits, though that rebellion has unexpected consequences. Those who are looking for a straightforward space story, with clean lines and a victorious ending, may not enjoy this book. It isn't an easy read -- parts of it are frank and brutal, within a narrative that slides from one idea to another with little warning -- but it is a rewarding one, granting the determined reader much food for thought, much recognition, and its own sometimes ambiguous beauty. For those who like their science fiction fresh, thoughtful, and self-aware, this is an excellent book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I love a good generation-ship story. The sociological (and technological) possibilities are endless when a self-contained group of people is left on their own for hundred or thousands of years. There is so much room for an author to use their imagination on the fate of human society. But there are rules. To me, the most fundamental rule of world-building of any kind is that all the pieces have to hang together. An author can't just throw in an arbitrary bit of the world just for the heck of it; it has to matter to the plot. Otherwise it just hangs there like a vestigial organ.Unfortunately, this book seems to have a lot of that. Vestigial organs include:•gender identity - Solomon creates a structure where children on one deck are all referred to as girls (until they did something to indicate that they weren't actually a girl) and on another deck all children are referred to gender neutrally. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except that it doesn't seem to matter in terms of the plot, or anything else in the book. It just sits there, like the proverbial gun that is introduced in Act One, but fails to go off by Act Three.•religion - Solomon seems to be trying to set up the system on the ship as being driven by a very strict theocracy, except aside from mentioning that leaders of the ship are supposed to given their power and authority by their god, religion doesn't actually seem to play much of a part of the story. Except one character engages in some ritual self-flagellation. There was that.•neuroatypicality - Our main character, Aster, is an interesting person, who displays symptoms of something along the lines of Asperger's Syndrome. Whether that's the diagnosis Solomon intended Aster to have is neither nor there, because the question is why Aster is portrayed in this at all. The only plot point for which her symptoms seem relevant is to create tension when she can't understand the motivations of the Surgeon, and to therefore create wholly unnecessary and artificial tension between them.To say that all of this detracted from the story as a whole is an understatement. If only the plot were strong enough to bear the weight of all that, but it's not. I could never quite figure out what was supposed to be driving the plot. Was it the plight of the people on the ship altogether, or specifically Aster's search for answers about her mother? Or was the latter supposed to inform the former in the task of pushing the story forward? I don't know, and by the time the book wrapped up, I didn't much care.
    • 5/5
      Brutal and terrific. Aster is a lowdecks genius on a generation ship that has slavery based on deck status (which is basically but not completely tied to race). Her role as the Surgeon’s apprentice gives her more freedom, but also exposes her to the righteous sadism of the ship’s leader. Her best friend Giselle is a rebel, but also suffers from what might be manic depression (it’s hard to tell when harms come so fast and furious), harms herself, and destroys anything she can reach. Aster investigates the mystery of her mother, who killed herself shortly after giving birth, and begins to think that she can change the course of the ship, both literally and figuratively. That’s only the scantest of summaries though—it’s a book about how trauma and discrimination shape people, mostly for worse; it’s a book about how societies work when the governing ideology is that rape and beatings are things to which some people are entitled and others are entitled to carry out; it’s a book about the scraps of hope that survive, and that don’t justify or erase the horrors or even transcend them, but that exist nonetheless. Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      Somewhat like a mashup between Battlestar Galactica, The Handmaid's Tale, and Roots. The thematic premise of this story seems to be that even in the future (about 300 years) in a situation where humanity is traveling between stars, the current unjust class system will not only be reproduced but will be exacerbated. We won’t have some flatline merit-based, deprivation free world. Solomon has created the anti-Star Trek.The storyline finds, like in Galactica, a colony ship traveling from Earth to some distant unknown destination. But in Solomon’s version, the class system is systematized by decks. Each deck carries some several thousand individuals. The “lower” decks are people of color, and they are essentially prisoners working the crops that feed the upper decks, which are primarily Caucasian. Gender is more fluid and ambiguous in this world, but primarily women are at least represented in the story in these lower decks. We don’t meet any lower-class male characters. Like Handmaid’s Tale, the ruling class enforces religious doctrine that must be followed, curfews and other checks. Guards have free reign to abuse any lower class residents and rape women. The ship has regressed to a system of slavery to benefit the upper class. Most of the history of Earth has been forgotten and the ship has developed its own cultural systems.The storyline follows one female character, from the lower deck, who is apparently a medical genius of sorts and a few of her “friends:” another lowerdeck female who is a bit insane and an upper-class surgeon who recognizes her brilliance.So far, so good, the story has a valuable and meaningful premise. Unfortunately, I found much of the mechanics of the storytelling to be a bit…mechanical? And somewhat frustrating and monotonous to read. Solomon’s linguistic skills, the actual writing itself, was solid enough. Somewhere between the characterization decisions she made and the development of relationships and interactions between the characters, combined with some awkward storytelling choices, left me feeling a bit cold and bored with the story.For example, the main character is rather robotic in her personality. She takes everything very literally. One might think she was portrayed as having some profile such as Asperger Syndrome. As such, her decisions were almost always very frustrating and obtuse. Most of her interactions with other characters didn’t develop into deeper connections. And this was exacerbated by the storytelling technique where characters seemed to have fairly short and unsatisfying conversations. They always seemed to be leaving each other with unfinished communications, either running away before the conversation could be completed due to anger or being cutoff by some event that occurs or one individual leaving due to some urgent demand. In the end, this left me feeling disconnected from the characters. And it also felt like herky-jerky storytelling…the key plot points that characters communicate to each other get unnecessarily distributed throughout the story making it feel much longer than it needed to be. Some degree of frustration of the reader can be thematically appropriate and necessary. But as a pattern over the whole book, it made it feel too long and dare-I-say it, boring. I kept wanting to just get to the heart of the matter, and Solomon continually postponed it. It didn’t help matters that the main character’s childhood friend has been driven rather insane, making the story’s second most important character also hard to relate to or connect with. The third main character is the upper-class surgeon. While he had an interesting backstory, he never quite jelled for me. As written, he felt too mechanical.Oh, and I wish the publisher had googled “An Unkindness of…” because this phrase is in the title of at least two other novels, making this less original than it seems.
    • 4/5
      This story is set on an intergenerational ship that has escaped a catastrophic event hundreds of years in the past.

      Over time, everyone has segregated into color and sometimes gender orientation. And those who are at all different are relegated to lower decks and treated like slaves with no rights and few comforts. A religious cult has grown over the different classes of people, with the supreme commander treated as a god.

      Definitely a morality play, but really well-developed characters and story line.
    • 3/5
      3.5/5 stars rounding upThis was a great book that did a great job introducing us to a very diverse and important character and depicting them in such a realistic way. I really enjoyed Aster and intricacies. She lives in such a brutal environment, yet still finds purpose and a way to help people. The Matilda as a setting was really well done. I found that the world building inside the ship was very intricate and well explained, yet the world outside it was not so much. The society that has developed on this ship is appalling, yet so realistic to our past. The enslavement of people based on colour, the white supremacy that goes along with it, and the very strict gender roles that were just so ridiculous, were done so well. Solomon really went deep and didn't pull out at all when confronting these issues and the oppression of these people. Aster, was a great character to follow and I enjoyed her POV and the mystery involving her mother's death. The way Aster navigates her world was interesting and really compelling. The ending ending up being a bit of a letdown for me though. I felt like no resolution actually happened. There was definitely a great climax and hope that things would change, but we were left in the dark. I also didn't really like how Aster's story was so open ended...it just seemed like the author didn't know how to end the story so she just picked a spot and said, "That looks good."Overall, a very powerful read, if not for the slightly disappointing ending. Hopefully my review actually makes sense.

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    • 4/5
      I'll admit this one was hard to finish and concentrate on at times, but that was all me and not the author's fault at all. I had a hard time visualizing the world-ship, but came to something similar to a mash-up of the silos in Dust and the world-ship in The Stars Are Legion. Very interesting take on a fascist future who we should fight. I was interested in how the gender and culture differences between decks came to be, though the story didn't provide quite as much detail as I wanted. Overall another good one from Solomon. Definitely picking up anything they publish in the future.
    • 3/5
      This book is a hot mess, but within the mess there are interesting and novel fragments. It is basically obstinate will and inventiveness versus vicious oppression, but there are massive inconsistencies and improbabilities in this young woman and allies against the viscous regime plot. It needed some sever editing and with no sense of pacing it dragged in several sections.

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