The Booker train is heading into the station to pick up the 2024 longlist, while will be announced next week, and to be honest, I’m ready to be done with the 2023 list. I’ve found it overwhelming “meh.” I still have one more to read, a book which hasn’t been published in the US yet, but I certainly haven’t been wowed. (Western Lane remains my personal winner.)
I’m going to start this review by saying I’m not sure this 496-page novel knew what it wanted to be, but what it ended up being was certainly not the novel for me. A lot of folks loved Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension (Black Cat 2023), but I am not one of them. I don’t dislike it – I just find it entirely too long in some respects while woefully too short in others.
Short and long – Leigh is a talented marine biologist who was part of an exploration team deep in the Atlantic. This work leads her to the United States and a new space agency that’s really only spoken about in whispers and NDAs. They are interested in her work with algae and its sustainability as a food source for space exploration. She becomes part of that team.
I gravitate toward character development, and there’s not a lot of that here. I also like domesticity and the juxtaposition of that with, as in this case, a sci fi novel. While I get some of that, it’s far from enough. The novel starts with Leigh’s childhood and the physical abuse she sustained at her father’s hands. We also see her trying to be a good daughter with her mother who is experiencing some aspects of dementia – the three weeks she stays with her mom, the plants she sends for her mom to take care of, the recordings, etc. But we also see her lose interest and fail at these human connections. I wanted to like her. Maybe as much as she wanted to be there for her family. I just didn’t. And she wasn’t.
The novel is divided into five sections. The first, Endeavor, is the diving expedition. It is probably my favorite section of the novel as I felt like we did see more of Leigh and her goals, passions, etc. I never did feel like she was fully fleshed out – she always read a bit hollow, but that got more and more pronounced as the novel progressed. Intentional? Maybe. But it didn’t work for me.
Read it. Don’t read it. Meh.
Booker Count 12 of 13.
A Girl Named Tommi 