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Summary
Summary
A thrilling, thought-provoking novel from one of young-adult literature's boldest new talents.
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?
Author Notes
Corinne Duyvis is a novelist and short story writer and an editor of the website Disability in Kidlit. She's a graduate of the Clarion West writer's workshop and lives in Amsterdam. Her first novel, Otherbound , received four starred reviews, and Horn Book called it "a humdinger of an adventure that contains the agony of loyalty, the allure of magic, and, most gratifyingly, the element of surprise." www.corinneduyvis.net.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A biracial, autistic teenager and her drug-addicted mother take shelter in a temporarily grounded generation ship as a comet threatens life on Earth; they must prove their usefulness to earn a spot on the Nassau or risk getting left behind to fend for themselves. Told from the perspective of 16-year-old Denise, the story examines the aftermath of the cataclysmic event and her search for her transgender sister, Iris, among the wreckage near Amsterdam while raising important questions about social issues that are as applicable today as in the not-so-distant future of 2035. On the ship, stringent rules and regulations attempt to define who is worthy of supplies and survival while Denise struggles to find a way to belong and weighs the risk of sneaking her mother on board. Readers are immersed in the tics and tactile aspects of Denise's condition as Duyvis (Otherbound) skillfully incorporates an exploration of complex mental conditions, addiction, and gender identity into her narrative. It's a riveting apocalyptic thriller with substantial depth. Ages 13-up. Agent: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Erin Murphy Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Running late to reach the shelter that will shield them from an apocalyptic comet, autistic teenager Denise and her drug-addicted mother find temporary safety on a generation ship, which will soon leave to colonize another planet. The ship is full; however, Denise learns that those with useful skills may gain passage. A cast of diverse, fully realized characters populate this story of surviving a world-ending disaster. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
A comet is coming, and the world as Denise knows it is probably going to end. Civilians have been informed to take shelter, close down their houses, and stay as safe as they can. On the predicted day of the event, Denise's perennially high and easily distracted mother waits too long for Denise's sister, Iris, and they end up instead aboard a generation ship a skills-based space station community sent to colonize other planets. The ship must leave before impact, but Denise worries she won't be determined useful enough to stay, and her autism makes the shattered world and the rules aboard the ship ever harder to parse. She tries to help the crew of the ship and, along the way, has to keep herself safe. Denise's fear is palpable throughout, which helps to push this sci-fi novel into thriller territory. Though this is unlikely to convert science fiction doubtfuls, Duyvis' attention to detail and strong descriptions will recommend this to fans of the genre.--Comfort, Stacey Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN A TYPICAL young adult disaster novel, society collapses and survival depends on a young woman's guts (and maybe her ability to pick a good love interest). Yet too often the world seems to end, and to exist, only for pleasantly middle-class communities, nuclear families and otherwise "normal" people by the standards of American media: white, straight, cisgender, abled and at least well-off enough that square meals aren't rare. Everybody else is mysteriously gone long before the apocalypse comes. Corinne Duyvis's ON THE EDGE OF GONE (Amulet, $17.95) is in some ways about what happens to those who usually go unmentioned. There's Denise, who is autistic; her sister, Iris, who is trans; their drug-addicted mother; and their absent Surinamese father. (The story takes place in near-future Amsterdam, and being half-Surinamese makes the girls black by Dutch standards.) When word comes that a comet strike will soon render Earth barely habitable, Denise and her family are among the unlucky thousands assigned to precarious shelters; they're pretty much doomed. Chance, however, leads them to one of the few remaining ships that haven't left the planet. This gives them an opportunity to join the lucky few who will escape to an Earth-like world in a distant star system - if, that is, the ship is willing to take on such a misfit family. Thus this becomes not only the usual allegory for millennials trying to cope with a changing world, but also an excoriation of Y.A.'s traditional shallowness. The problem threatening Denise isn't the comet but acceptance. She and her family might be all right if the new world order could find a way to equally value the disabled, the nonwhite, the non-binary and the people who need an artificial coping mechanism or two. With assimilation impossible, Denise first attempts accommodation - working harder and taking terrible risks to prove herself. When this, too, fails, her sister reminds Denise of another option: revolution. This is not necessarily of the violent kind, however. Instead of overthrowing a corrupt regime, Denise just has to get her fellow survivors to think differently about what survival truly means. A violent revolution might be easier. The pacing is a little slow, and many of the characters outside of Denise's family are flatter than they should be. Still, given the heavy themes the story juggles, immersion in this complicated family is probably a good thing. THE STORIES IN Carlos Hernandez's cheekily titled new collection, THE ASSIMILATED CUBAN'S GUIDE TO QUANTUM SANTERIA (Rosarium, paper, $17.95), paint intriguing vignettes in which characters contend equally with the trials of American race relations, ethnic assimilation, magic, technology and theoretical physics. Characters wend out of one story only to wend into another in a similar but different form, as if from a parallel universe; meanwhile, concepts that feel like anime parody (giant robot panda pilots - no, really, it's for a good cause) are accorded the same respect as ritual and ancestral pride. Yet despite the daring title and concepts, the stories themselves are curiously conservative, as when every woman in a story is either sexualized or dead. (Or weirdly both: In "More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give," the protagonist's awesome dead mother is nicknamed Milhuevos because she was shot by Castro's troops while bragging about her thousand unfertilized eggs.) Lots of science fiction and fantasy two-dimensionalizes women, granted, but it's disappointing to see the pattern in a collection that clearly interrogates marginalization and stereotypes. Another tiring pattern is the frequency with which Hernandez's mostly male protagonists express angst about their fathers or sons. (Daughters exist, but nobody seems to worry much about them.) This can be haunting on its own, as in the opening story, about a 60-something man scaling Everest to bring back his son - who, like Schrödinger's cat, might be dead and might be alive. Yet the theme recurs so often that by the time the reader reaches the title story at the end, perhaps the best of the father-son stories, it feels overdone. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and worthwhile collection, provided you don't expect it to live up to its title. READERS WHO LOVED Sofia Samatar's multiple-awardwinning 2013 novel "A Stranger in Olondria" may be pleased to know that THE WINGED HISTORIES (Small Beer, $24) is related, although it isn't quite a sequel. It stands alone in that the story no longer follows the earlier novel's protagonist, but a reader might benefit from knowing something about the ethnic and religious politics of Olondria - land of almonds, land of myrrh - before delving into this tale about its civil war. Or not. A mythopoeic summary of Olondria's history begins about a quarter of the way in, and there's a glossary at the back, but neither is really necessary to absorb this dense study of four characters. All are women, and all are integral to the war, though their contributions are frequently obscured in ways that will be familiar to any student of women in real-world history. Tav, the opening character, provides a forewarning. Although she starts like the heroines of many novels in being a noble-born teenager who rides off to become a "swordmaiden," Samatar quickly disabuses the reader of any romantic notions. Tav discovers that life as a soldier is grueling and cruel, that the politics pushing soldiers onto a battlefield are rarely worth their blood, and that fighting for a nation as one of its undervalued minorities holds a particularly bitter taste. The rest of the story is built around the fallout of Tav's revelations, though other characters take over the narrative. All of it is harrowing - and written in such heartstoppingly beautiful language there's a good chance readers will ignore the plot and spend a few hours just chewing on the words, slowly, to draw out the flavor. Then they'll need to read it again. Fortunately, this is a short book; also fortunately, there's a lot of novel packed into relatively few pages. A highly recommended indulgence. LIKEWISE, LEENA KROHN'S COLLECTED FICTION (Cheeky Frawg, $36.99) is inherently indulgent: It's massive, as befits the encapsulation of a prolific (Finnish) writer's life work, and it's multifaceted, deploying varied formats and lenses, including multiple translators, to present a complete picture. Within are short stories, several short novels, poetry, and essays about Krohn, including one by the author herself. Since most English-language readers will have encountered Krohn's work only via her epistolic novel "Tainaron: Mail From Another City" (translated in the United States in 2004), if at all, probably the most useful thing this collection does is put that novel into its proper context. It becomes rapidly clear that Krohn's work is not meant to stand alone. Creatures and characters string together in a constantly self-referential loop that's mostly lacking in plot or narrative - but there's significance to which characters reappear, and which themes Krohn addresses again and again. The doctor in the excerpted novel "Umbra," who confronts his own fears while ostensibly examining a neurotic sentient computer, might as well have worked at the old hospital in the excerpt from "The Bee Pavilion"; what seems to interest Krohn more than artificial intelligence are the struggles of the mind, and the struggles of individuals and groups to define it. It's debatable whether Krohn's works qualify as science fiction or fantasy, not that it matters. Missing is the "sensawunda" said to characterize the genre; Krohn's settings are fantastical and deeply weird, but they're mostly secondary to the people - or philosophy, or sociology - she really wants to explore. Even in a story like "Tainaron," in which the narrator writes letters describing a city populated by insects, Krohn focuses primarily on metaphors for the human condition. "Never trust a flower," the narrator's guide says, upon rescuing a citizen from a giant carnivorous plant. "Next time, think where you put your head." A caution relevant to any dweller in any city, insect-inhabited or not. This is a haunting, lovely book.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-As a biracial girl with autism, Denise has never been very comfortable in her own skin. Six months ago, when the world wasn't ending, her only real relationships were with her sister, Iris, and the cats in the animal shelter where she worked after school. Now, Denise's only chance for surviving the comet that threatens to destroy all human life on Earth is to earn a spot on a generation ship, a vessel that will transport colonists to another habitable planet across the galaxy. While coping with the complete disruption of her daily routines, as well as continuing threats of natural disasters, Denise must prove herself useful enough to save not only her own life but those of her sister and her drug-addicted mother. But even if her family is lucky enough to escape, what about the rest of the families in her home city of Amsterdam? What about those across the rest of the world? Duyvis expertly employs real science and vivid imagery to bring to life the most terrifying villain of all: Mother Nature. But it is the author's talent for writing about human nature that sets this book apart. Insightful, suspenseful, and unsettling in its plausibility, this novel is sure to stick with readers long after the last page has been turned. VERDICT A high level of believability and excellent writing make this diverse apocalyptic novel a recommended selection for any young adult collection.-Liz Overberg, Zionsville Community High School, IN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
What should a mixed-race, autistic, 16-year-old be willing to do to avoid certain death in an apocalyptic hellhole? A comet's about to strike Earth, and the rich, powerful, or lucky have choices: they can survive in underground shelters for the decades until the planet is once again easily habitable or take to a generation ship headed to deep space. Daughter of a Dutch woman and an Afro-Surinamese man, Denise is none of the above; her family has a spot in a temporary shelter, after which they'll be stuck in the post-comet wasteland Amsterdam (and much of the planet) will have become. Denise finds temporary refuge in a secret generation ship, but the residents jealously guard their precious resources. She's desperate to find a place on the ship for her family, but on a ship where the two choices are "usefulness or death," she worries they'll never choose her drug-addicted motheror her autistic self. Meanwhile she seeks her sister, lost in the rubble of Amsterdam. Heroism isn't restricted to Denise, nor is she the only complex, deeply imperfect character to make selfish choices in this unbearable world. It's unsurprising that Duyvis, autistic herself, draws a superbly nuanced portrait of Denise as person (not a collection of pitiable autism tropes or cure narratives), but what makes this a winner is the nerve-wracking adventure. Life-affirming science fiction with spaceships, optimism in the apocalypse, and a diverse cast that reflects the real world. (Science fiction. 11-15) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
