Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sallis (Bridge Segments) delivers a fragmented take on social mayhem in this near-future dystopian tale. Following a devastating civil war, the United States has fractured into independent provinces ruled by warring factions, "each one working chiefly to aggrandize itself, then push through some recondite agenda for social order." Told by a motley crew of survivors, these five loosely connected stories form a collage of political and personal turmoil. A soldier recounts commandeering armaments in Free Alaska while longing to be reunited with a woman rebel fighter he met early during the war; an orphaned boy tells of witnessing his sister's death at the hands of a soldier returning from battle; and a surgeon relates his tribulations as a "frontier doctor treating cancer with hacksaws and dressmaker's thread," and learns more about the state of the world after one of his patients is abducted by soldiers. The stories have a slice of life feel as they eulogize the lost nation and the ruined hopes of its citizens. While the big ideas are resonant and timely, Sallis offers few surprises and favors telling over showing, making it difficult to connect emotionally with the characters. Readers will find more nourishing food for thought elsewhere. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Sallis's (Sarah Jane) novel contains five linked stories that explore a future American society that has fallen into a fascist state and is riddled with violence. It describes a nation that is torn apart by a series of unnamed factions, each vying to divide up power and trying to control the country. Reading the novel's opening story is like having a terrible fever dream of an autocratic takeover of the United States, with drones policing protesters, governments toppling, and a violent resistance looking for any handhold it can grab. As the stories continue, this bleak future is eventually offset with the hope that people will once again find community and each other, in the face of challenging times. The novel's sweeping vision means no particular character or event gets much play, giving the text a blink-and-you'll-miss it quality, which is not entirely pleasant to experience. Characters and events wink in and out of existence so fast that it can become a challenge to maintain interest and focus on the overarching story. VERDICT This is a suspenseful dystopian novel that grounds its reborn future United States in the hope and philosophy that eventually the arch of the universe will bend toward democracy.--Jeremiah Rood
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cautiously hopeful view of the futuristic horrors headed our way is perfectly described by its subtitle: "A Mosaic Novel." The United States has gone the way of all those other empires, past and present, fragmenting into separate and variously dysfunctional regions, communities, and neighborhoods, many of them at war with each other not over ideological differences but in endless battles for the affordances that keep them alive. Sallis explores the implications of this disintegration, in which "foundations fall away, one after another," in five stories. Their titles--"Dayenu," a Hebrew word meaning "it would have been enough"; "Carriers"; "Settlers"; "Allotments"; and "Reconstruction"--seem to chart a path from destruction to rebirth, and readers who squint hard enough may see such a progression. What's much clearer, however, is the repeated patterns among the stories: There's the veteran who finds returning home more taxing than waging war, the medical provider facing impossible odds, the precocious children fighting their predators, the abrupt disappearance and occasional equally disconcerting reappearance of colleagues, lovers, and old friends, and the mentors whose nuggets of wisdom (e.g., "the only way we get through our lives is by imagining elsewheres and other times") are ever more treasured as they become more inadequate to the moment. Lacking the razor-sharp premise of P.D. James'The Children of Men (1993), with which it shares an equally elegiac sensibility, Sallis' tale, or tales, depends for its power on individual insights and a thematic throughline: Apart from all those unbridled conflicts, the nightmare future it presents sounds a great deal like this morning's headlines. A supercut of videos and aphorisms that, like all dystopias, uses prophecies of tomorrow to raise hard questions about today. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
