On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis is an apocalyptic YA novel. It's about an autistic girl, set about twenty years in the future when a comet hits the Earth. Location-wise, the book is set in the general vicinity of Amsterdam. Also, don't you think the cover is gorgeous? I think I would buy this book just for the cover, even if I was unfamiliar with the author's other work.

January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one.

Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.

A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?

When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?

This book starts in a stressful place. Denise, the main character, and her mother are running late for their assigned temporary shelter. At the opening, the shelter will take longer for them to get to than they have time left before the predicted comet strike. This sets the stage for Denise's interactions with her mother for the rest of the book. Her mother is unreliable, in large part due to her drug addiction, and this reader got the impression that Denise would be much better off without her mother around. For a while there I was crossing my fingers for the mother's death.

Just about everyone else in Denise's life (that showed up in the present of this book) was a more positive force. The narrative is tightly in the first person, which means that often the reader is left to draw conclusions, mostly about people, that Denise does not reach. On the other hand, the tight narrative really gets us into Denise's head and I found myself sympathising with her quite strongly. I also really enjoyed watching Denise make friends when given the opportunity outside of school; that was a real highlight.

Duyvis does a particularly good job of maintaining tension in the narrative of On the Edge of Gone. Although Denise survives the apocalypse and, since it's written in first person, her survival until the end of the book is a safe bet, there is a lot of other uncertainty. Will Denise be safe? What trouble is her mum going to get (her) into next? What will be the consequence of the risky choices Denise makes throughout the book? It was very well written. Ordinarily I would have expected this to be the sort of book that I could read in one sitting, but I found myself having to pause a few times and get some distance because it was so intense. The apocalypse is obviously always going to be somewhat depressing, but the extra layer of tension that Duyvis writes over the top of it, really brings it home.

I strongly recommend On the Edge of Gone to anyone who is interested in apocalyptic fiction, YA or otherwise. Apart from anything else, this is a solid science fiction book centred around a scientifically plausible response to a disastrous event. People interested in reading about autistic main characters should also be aware that the author herself is autistic and, as noted in the afterword, is partly writing from experience.

5 / 5 stars

First published: March 2016, Amulet Books
Series: No. But it is set in the same world as Duyvis's Defying Doomsday story.
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Disclaimer: I have worked with the author for Defying Doomsday, but I don't think that has affected the objectivity of my review

Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis

Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis is the author's début novel. It first drew my attention because of some blogs I follow, then I happened to read some of author's short stories and knew I had to read her novel too.

Amara is never alone. Not when she's protecting the cursed princess she unwillingly serves. Not when they're fleeing across dunes and islands and seas to stay alive. Not when she's punished, ordered around, or neglected.

She can't be alone, because a boy from another world experiences all that alongside her, looking through her eyes.

Nolan longs for a life uninterrupted. Every time he blinks, he's yanked from his Arizona town into Amara's mind, a world away, which makes even simple things like hobbies and homework impossible. He's spent years as a powerless observer of Amara's life. Amara has no idea . . . until he learns to control her, and they communicate for the first time. Amara is terrified. Then, she's furious.

All Amara and Nolan want is to be free of each other. But Nolan's breakthrough has dangerous consequences. Now, they'll have to work together to survive--and discover the truth about their connection.

I loved Otherbound. It's meticulously thought through and beautifully written. Nolan is not a normal teenage boy and isn't sure how to be. He spends a large chunk of his life involuntarily living someone else's life. It's distracting to the point where he can't concentrate on school, ride a bike safely or do anything else normal teenagers do. He tries to keep his life together, but it's a constant struggle he rarely wins. But he's not doing anything stupid or irrational, which makes him more likeable than a lot of YA main characters. His doctors, who think he has a rare form of epilepsy with hallucinations, put him on some new meds which allow him to interact with the world he sees when he closes his eyes. And so the real story begins.

Meanwhile Amara lives in a well-drawn and fully developed fantasy world. Her life is complex, living on the run with a princess who's the only survivor of a palace coup, their protector and another servant. Amara's job is simple: make sure the princess never gets hurt, because if she bleeds her curse will kill her. And when the princess does get hurt, Amara gets to step in and suffer in her place because she's "lucky" enough to have healing magic. There is nothing happy about Amara's life but it's stable until Nolan realises he can take control of her body.

I really loved this book. I particularly appreciated Duyvis's attention to detail. Often, when I'm reading a book I'm having feelings over I'll explain the premise and characters to my husband (without spoilers for books I want him to read) and he always manages to find the plot-/worldbuilding-holes just from my summary. Not this time! Every detailed was accounted for even when some of those details were misdirection.

It was also well written on a sentence level. When my eyes excitedly jumped down the page because I wanted to know what happened next, I always went back to read the half-paragraph or whatever that I skipped.

I highly recommend Otherbound to all YA and adult fantasy fans. I would be remiss if I didn't also recommend it to readers looking for diversity. Nolan is hispanic and Nahuatl and has a prosthetic leg. The magic stuff also has many parallels with chronic illness (although isn't because magic). Amara had her tongue cut out at a young age (because she's a servant) and has to sign with her hands to communicate. But whether you care about diversity or not, Otherbound is excellent. Do yourself a favour and read it. I will definitely be keeping a keen eye on Duyvis's future work.

5 / 5 stars

First published: June 2014, Amulet Books
Series: No (shockingly)
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased from the iBooks store

A semi-random selection of short stories

Yesterday I found myself reading a bunch of free-floating short stories (as in, not part of a collection/anthology), as well as stories from an anthology I'll be reviewing as soon as I finish. I seem to have been reading a lot of short stories lately. This is not a bad thing. I wasn't going to review the free-floaters because I had other reasons for reading them, but then I thought, why not?

So here we have some brief thoughts on some miscellaneous stories by Corinne Duyvis, Aliette de Bodard and Ken Liu, presented in the order I read them.

Corinne Duyvis

"Eight", which you can read here. It's a time travel story with future versions of the main character travelling back in time to try to prevent or mitigate the effects of a terrible war. But is it even possible to prevent the war? And what happens to the futures they leave behind? A very touching story.

"Rule of Threes", which you can read here. Set in the Australian outback (an unusual setting for a non-Australian to write in), the story follows the survivors of a plague of horrible lizard things. (On the other hand, given how the rest of the world sees our fauna, maybe it's not such a surprising choice.) It was a good story, even if it didn't feel quite as Australian as, well, stories by Australians that I've read.

Aliette de Bodard

"Safe, Child, Safe", which you can read here. I think this is set in the same universe as her Obsidian and Blood trilogy (which I haven't read, but which is on my TBR). A priest for the Dead is asked by a desperate father to help his young child. The malady is unusual and the reveal not a happy one.

Ken Liu

"You'll Always Have the Burden With You", which you can read here. This was a story about archaeology on a long-empty alien planet. The idea of the modern minutiae of civilisation being less permanent than Earth's Egyptian pyramids was an interesting one. But what really made this story stand out for me was the "punch-line" towards the end. Brilliant.

"The Paper Menagerie", which you can read here. This had a terribly sad ending. About the son of an American man and his mail-order (more or less) bride, whose mother made him magical origami animals. The son goes through the oh-so-common (dare I say almost universal?) migrant child phase of refusing to speak his mother's language because it marks him as an outsider. The end, as I said, is heartbreaking. It's no wonder this story won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards (the first time any one story took out all three).