To name a thing Solomon does in this book is to praise it.
With her sometimes-friend, sometimes-antagonist Giselle's help, Aster begins decoding Lune's journals to trace the mystery of her mother's death and the secrets at Matilda's heart.
The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books Colson Whitehead's 'Underground Railroad' Is A Literal Train To Freedomīut there's something wrong with Matilda's power source - something connected to the current ailing Sovereign, and more importantly, to Aster's lost mother, Lune. With his support, and using the resources of a secret greenhouse she calls her botanarium, Aster navigates Matilda's horrors to bring succour and healing where she can. In spite of her differences, she's respected for the extensive medical knowledge she's gleaned from her dead mother's journals, and for her curious friendship with an upperdecker who's almost as much of an anomaly as she is: Theo, the Surgeon General, a light-skinned bastard son of the former Sovereign.
Orphaned as an infant by her mother's suicide, neuroatypical, and ambiguously gendered among those who hold to rigid binaries, Aster is an outsider to most of her social groups: Her bunkmates mock her and her fellow lowdeckers are confused by her. The upperdeckers also hoard religion their Sovereignty, a sort of limited constitutional monarchy, claims that every sin committed by lowdeckers widens the gulf between Matilda and the Promised Land they've been in search of for 325 years. Reading it, I felt it carving out a vastness inside me, pouring itself into me like so many stars, and the more I read the bigger I felt, falling down a rabbit-hole of sky and wanting only to go deeper and farther with every page.Īster lives on a generation ship called Matilda, organized much like an antebellum plantation in space: The black and brown people on the lower decks, tightly policed by vicious guards and overseers, do the hard labor that enables the white people in the upper decks to hoard wealth, heat, and comfort. Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts is the kind of novel I need to describe in terms of what it did to me.
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