David Yoon's CITY OF ORANGE

Something I saw on Twitter recently kept coming to mind as I worked to solve the sad mysteries of David Yoon's City of Orange. The tweet said something like, "Hey, white people, racism is just fascism that hasn't caught up to you yet."

There's neither much racism (just a tiny bit; our hero is a Californian of Korean decent and is married to a black woman, but we only see one or two microagressions in the course of the novel) nor much fascism in City of Orange, but the book seems to exist to prove a related point. The apocalypse has already happened for some people, and it's happening to someone new every day. It just probably, if you're reading these lines, hasn't caught up to you yet. 

City of Orange is a clever title that's doing a lot of work in its novel. It is of course a place designation; our hero (who doesn't get a name until late in the book), amnesiac and injured as we join him in the manner of half of the modern day video game industry's output*, is quite possibly in the actual city of Orange, CA, or at least in Orange County, with much of his story taking place in and along the concrete-lined, dry channel of the L.A. River.

But that's not all. The title also refers to a thought experiment our hero vaguely recalls from school at some point, in which he and his classmates were given a writing prompt: "What if the City Were Orange"" with follow up questions like "What Would You Do in an Orange City?" and "Why Would it be Fun?":

Anyway: imagine everything orange, from the sky down to the whites (the oranges?) of your eyeballs. The orange color was beside the point, he'd written In Conclusion. Ann orange world wouldn't be any different from a city of purple or a city of green. The important thing was that everything was in monochrome. In a monochromatic world, you'd have no other colors to compare against. There wouldn't even be a concept of color to begin with. It might as well be all black and white. And did people living in black and white worlds -- like actors in old movies, or dogs -- feel like they were missing out on something? If they didn't even know what color was, did it matter?

Nameless Hero's own world has become monochrome well before our story proper starts, and he wakes up with a severe head injury on the concrete floor of the L.A. River, very much aware that he has forgotten a lot of important things but also aware that he probably doesn't want to remember. Snatches of memory start trickling back anyway as he takes stock of his situation: no other people around, only devastated and ruined houses visible nearby, everything around him in a state of neglect and decay. One of the things he has forgotten, he realizes, is what exactly happened to make the world this way, to cause the End of the World. Orange becomes a color of decay and danger, of rust and of mold and of smoldering embers and raging wildfire, and then, as he begins to remember what he, personally, had before it all went to pot, his emotional color plunges into a monochrome of grief.

Once, he had a beautiful wife he was crazy about and they had a baby daughter. He can't remember their names, only the name of his best friend with whom he first got to know his wife. Nameless Hero's friend Byron was a survivalist type, constantly trying to teach NH about things like edible wild plants and water purification techniques, but NH was too distracted by the wonder that was overtaking his life as love and family came to dominate everything (more emotional monochrome; it isn't always bad, merely a bit unreal).

As NH settles into his new life as a Lone Survivor, more glimpses of his past come, allowing us to share in his joy and wonder at being a husband and then a brand new dad. And this is the other lesson of City of Orange: pay attention to those little moments of happiness and respect their brevity and beauty. My favorite of these comes relatively late in the novel, and takes place on a family trip to a butterfly pavilion, waylaid by the discovery of a big public fountain in which numerous parents and their young children are at play:

Look at how hilarious these toddlers were, careening through arch after arch, sometimes flopping their butts right down onto a gushing nozzle! They only stopped their bumbling stumbling to stare at one another in that dumbfounded kid way.

NH compares his daughter and the other toddlers, even more hilariously, to inebriated adults: "It's like they're drunk, said [REDACTED]. We're born drunk, and the we sober up, and when we're old we get drunk again, because fuck it."

Adding to the poignancy of it all, NH meets a little boy named Clay, who seems so splendidly at home in the ruins of civilization that NH all but makes him into a guru as together they hunt crows and explore applied geometry in the form of a weird contraption of cardboard and fishing line NH has idly constructed to track wind patterns in the apocalyptic L.A. River basin. And NH finally learns his name and gets the truth that he's not exactly sought, but also not felt complete without: he learns what destroyed his world. 
And if what he learns doesn't break your heart, do you even have one?

And so another author gets added to my "Must read whatever they publish" list. And my "I hope I don't ever meet them" list, too, because a lot of the scenes in City of Orange feel really specific and personal and I don't ever want to know how much of this novel is truly made up and how much might be autobiographical.

I certainly hope it's mostly made up and isn't a fictionalization of David Yoon's own experience. Because it's the stuff you don't wish on your worst enemy, no, not even on the Orange Fascist who is still hogging the headlines as I finish this post.

But somebody should make that guy read this. If anyone could use a lesson in how everybody gets their own apocalypse, it's him. But I digress.

*Which, get ready for the video game references. This novel reads like a walkthrough of a high quality but very personal game, from its amnesiac protagonist discovering the world tutorial level to its ever expanding map -- and City of Orange is not coy about its relationship to gaming. As our Nameless Hero comes to grip with his world, he very explicitly compares it to a game, with lots of cute observations like "He wants to smash a toaster to see if it'll give up a rotating heart or a green mushroom or ammo or some kind of goodie."

Dana Schwartz' ANATOMY: A LOVE STORY

Adorable young love positively oozes from every crevice like maggots from a newly-exhumed corpse in podcaster Dana Schwartz' first historical novel. If that seems an unkind, unappealing or unromantic comparison to make, Anatomy: A Love Story might not be for you. But if you're a reader of my blog, that's probably not an issue, is it?

Anyway.

Let's take a moment, first and foremost, to talk about the perfection of this book cover, in which the skirts of our Georgian era heroine are carefully arranged to depict an anatomically accurate-for-being-done-in-textile human heart. Our heroine being a very young woman of the nobility* who wants with all of her (metaphorical) heart to become a surgeon. Not a physician, whose hands are rarely dirtied and who mostly exists to supply different varieties of opium to the well-heeled, but a surgeon. You know, the kind that hacks off diseased limbs and cuts gouty old men for "The Stone" and whatnot. As I said, this book cover is perfection. Chef's kiss. No notes.

Our heroine, Hazel Sinnet, has grown up in an honest-to-goodness Scottish castle, largely unsupervised because she doesn't matter to the family's fortunes so long as she sticks to their plan for her from birth: marry her first cousin, the son of her mother's brother, who is a Viscount. Until then, she's on her own, set to amuse and educate herself. In her father's library. Which is full of old and out-of-date but still fascinating books on medicine and natural history. Well, I mean, really. 

Plus, young Hazel is definitely one of us, as she demonstrates in her reaction to her lady's maid's suggestion that she take a break from her studies and go out and let society see her in a fashionable Edinburgh park, for which she might perhaps take a book. One book!:

One book? One book? Now you're being absurd. What if I finish it? Or what if I find it impossibly dull, what then? What am I supposed to read if I either complete the book I brought or I otherwise discover it to be unreadable? Or what if it no longer holds my attention? Someone could spill tea on it. There. Think of that. Someone could spill tea on my one book, and then I would be marooned. Honestly, Iona, you must use your head.

Life was so different and difficult before ebooks let us tote about a hrair books at all times, was it not? For the record, she ends up taking three books, two medical texts and a brand new novel by an unknown author, simply credited as "A Lady" - Sense and Sensibility. Well, of course it's that one.

But this is a love story. Who is her love? Surely not the cousin she was practically bred for; indeed, he is a boring dandy for all that he's been pretty indulgent about her eccentricities since they were (nobly born, privileged, rich) toddlers naked in the mud together. Who would it be most dramatically inconvenient for a a rich young lady to fall in love with?

How about the guy who procures bodies for Edinburgh Medical College? Who also works all the backdrops and the main curtain at the local theater? That is closed for another bout of Roman Fever (aka malaria) ripping through the city for yet another devastating plague season? And which Hazel fancies she'll be able to cure but only if she gets to study enough bodies of those who have died of it? I mean, how is she not going to fall in love with a Resurrection Man, unless he's really old and ugly and missing bits? Which sturdy young Jack Currer is decidedly not, though few would call him handsome?

Yeah.

But so, the only thing that I didn't completely love about this book was the unnecessary speculative fiction elements tacked on to its ending. A mystery involving the murders of other Resurrection Men and the maiming of various denizens of Edinburgh's scummy, slummy Old Town added quite enough excitement to the plot without [REDACTED], for me, but as ever, your mileage may vary.

Really, I'm pretty delighted that Schwartz, who has made a name for herself condensing the most scandalous or tragic or simply dramatic stories from the lives of the titled nobility of (mostly) Europe, chose to write a book like this instead of just a book version of her podcast. She has employed the skills she honed telling us lurid tales of Elizabeth Bathory and the Mayerling Incident and Sophia Dorotea of Celle to bring us an absolutely charming YA story of frowned-upon young love and the aspirations of a young woman who dares to dream of more than having the best dresses and jewelry to wear at the ball.

 *Ha ha

Yamen Manai's THE ARDENT SWARM (tr by Lara Vergnand)

Yamen Manai's lovely and tense The Ardent Swarm, the Tunisian author's first novel to be translated into English, has two villains,Vespa madarinia (what we in the US have dubbed Murder Hornets) and a rising political party that is mobilizing the countryside in favor of theocratic authoritarianism. But no, it's not set in the United States! Not everything is about us! For me, as for the novel's hero Sidi, it's all about the bees. 

Sidi is a beekeeper, a fixture in a village so small it doesn't even consider itself to be a village, in the fictional kingdom of Qafar, which is experimenting with democracy but is poised to reap that system's worst fruits as a demogogic fundamentalist "Party of God" is mounting a tremendous effort to convince the illiterate or barely literate citizens of the countryside to vote for them in exchange for gifts of food, clothing and blankets those citizens desperately need and, since they, like the rural poor in most places, don't really care who's in charge in the capital city, this strategy has every chance of working as our story starts.

But back to the bees and the beekeeper. Sidi is so devoted to the denizens of his hives that he refers to them as "his girls" and openly weeps when he finds that something has invaded one of them and brutally destroyed every last worker and drone, and even left the queen lying on her back, feebly kicking her wounded legs in the air before finally expiring. Reader, of course I cried. And immediately suspected, long before the other villain buzzed to the forefront of the novel's conflicts, that it was indeed the Giant Asian Hornet who had done the deed. But Sidi has never heard of such a thing; he's a simple man with profound knowledge and experience in one thing and one thing only, so this mysterious new threat not only to his livelihood but his entire existence is something he takes very seriously and approaches with a combination of deductive reasoning that would do Sherlock Holmes proud and a degree of physical courage that few of us could match.  He mounts a sleepless constant watch over his remaining hives -- he owes his beloved girls no less -- until he spots two of the thumb-length flying reconnaissance over his territory and marking the next hive for destruction with a reeking burst of pheromone attractants.

How did these monsters get here? Sidi's detective skills impress yet again as he discovers a surprising link between these invaders and the disturbing fundamentalists making weird promises to and demanding new levels of cultural and religious subservience from Sidi's friends and neighbors, who nonetheless come gladly to Sidi's aid when he decides that his plight calls for the kind of research he can't do with direct observation and experimentation and the kind of wise and careful, but slow, selective breeding that he has always employed to help his girls overcome previous threats -- fungal, bacterial, arachnoidal -- to their well-being, and this is where that title comes in.

An "Ardent Swarm" is the poetic name for a behavior that most of us who pay attention to things like murder hornets probably already know about, but was surprising new knowledge when Manai was writing this novel: bees who share the murder hornet's natural habitat have evolved a unique and devastatingly effective but costly defense: when one of these horrors lands on their doorstep, hundreds of worker bees pile on and around the invader's body and beat their wings and dance to generate kinetic energy, aka heat. The bees can tolerate higher temperatures than the hornets can, so the bees effectively cook their predator to death before it can do more damage. Of course, many workers get eviscerated by the hornet in the process of achieving the critical mass for an effective Ardent Swarm, but such is hive life. As long as the queen is safe!

The fact that this behavior strongly suggests itself as a metaphor for how Sidi's fellow visitors might respond to the threats posed by the Party of God and splinter groups that are more militant and less patient than the Party is delicately suggested but never explored outright; Manai is not writing a polemic or a guerilla warefare manual, he's writing a beautiful and tenderly observed novel about friendship, between man and bee, and between humans as well, as Sidi finds that his generosity over the years in sharing his knowledge and his honey has not gone unnoticed and will not go unrewarded. This is a strong contender for my best read of 2022.

I sure hope Manai and sound and unflashy translator Lara Vergnand bring more of his work to English language readers very soon. And now excuse me, I'm afraid I've gotten hooked on not one but two different versions of the casual mobile game of Ant Legion. Hymenoptera ahoy!

Vaishnavi Patel's KAIKEYI

In Kaikeyi author Vaishnavi Patel has not only brought a complicated figure from an Indian national epic, the Ramayana, to vivid life in a manner reminiscent of Pauline Gedge or Diana Paxson, but also taught us an incredible lesson on the power and worth of emotional intelligence. 

Kaikeyi, Yuvradni (princess) of a kingdom with a name virtually identical to hers, discovers not long after her father banishes her mother from the kingdom, that she has a certain magical gift: with concentration, she can enter what is called the Binding Plane, upon which she can see visual representations of the emotional bonds between people and, to a certain agree, manipulate those bonds. As a young girl she can only manipulate the bonds between herself and another, as she does when she convinces her twin brother, Crown Prince Yudhajit, to teach her what he's learning from his tutors but is forbidden her by sexist tradition, even after she proves to be the best administrator the kingdom's palace ever had. Thus young Kaikeyi gets to learn how to ride horses, fight with swords, shoot arrows, throw spears and drive a chariot -- skills she will later put to use in addition to her Binding Plane powers to secure herself firmly in the esteem and affection of her eventual husband, Raja Dasharatha of Kosala. While she's already kind of his favorite of his three wives because she's pretty and sure of herself, she rises to Number One in everybody else's estimation (well, almost everybody else; there are some Sages who still scowl at a woman being anything but a brood mare, of course) when she persuades her husband to let her ride out to battle with him, and then by a combination of her martial and Binding Plane skills lands herself with a chance to serve as her husband's charioteer in battle! And then she saves his life! And still manages to make it look like her husband was the real hero, because emotional intelligence isn't just a power she wields on the Binding Plane! This deed wins her his eternal gratitude and esteem, an eventual place on his governing council despite her being a woman, and the promise of two boons, requests that she may make at any time during their lives that he vows to the gods he will fulfill, no matter what she asks for.

I am only now reading the Ramayana, in an old fashioned translation into English verse, but I know that in that story Queen Kaikeyi is pretty close to being a villain (or is an unambiguous villain, if you're a misogynist, which, there's lots of misogyny in this story), so it's nice to see her get a chance at rehabilitation as a whole person with recognizable and relatable motivations and loves and fears. Patel gives Kaikeyi only a tiny chip on her shoulder about ancient India's sexism and a whole heart full of love for her husband (just not in a romantic or sexual way; she tolerates her wifely duties but comes to esteem Dasharatha as a close friend and an honorable man), his other two wives, and all of her husband's children, not just her own son by him, Bharata. This even though one of his sons by his other two wives turns out to be an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, the Rama that gives the Ramayana its name, and thus turns out to be quite a handful even before he's fully grown. Throughout the novel, though, she shows in word and deed that she considers all four of Dasharatha's sons to be her sons as well, little boys she loves to cuddle and play with and teach, then young men whose futures she plans for carefully despite knowing that they can't happen as everybody expects, for when she became Dasharatha's third wife she extracted a promise from him that whatever the birth order of his children, his first son by Kaikeyi would inherit his throne. This promise, and concerns that arise for Kaikeyi during the boys' childhoods stemming chiefly from a fundamentalist tutor who has persuaded Rama, and therefore all four of the sons, that women like Kaikeyi are an affront to the gods and should keep to their place, and that all the work she has done to help the people of Kosala, and especially the women, has been evil and needs undoing, are what forces her to use her two boons to affect the succession when Dasharatha suddenly decides to abdicate despite still being young and vital.

Dasharatha is totally under Rama's divine (but not necessarily benign, or even conscious) influence, Kaikeyi sees, and furthermore sees that Rama is not remotely ready to wield his divine or royal powers wisely yet, himself being under possibly demonic influence. Her boons are thus to send Rama into exile for ten years, and for Bharata to take the throne. Thus in the novel this is not a matter of her pride or status-panic; it's a sacrifice, of her relationships with everyone she loves, of the esteem her kingdom has held her in, of everything. By the time this inevitable doom befalls her, Patel has made us feel every bit of Kaikeyi's complex emotional world, but has left it all just ambiguous enough to let us wonder, even as we cry with her when her sons turn on her and her husband fades away, if Kaikeyi's understanding of events is actually correct. Sometimes the majority is wrong, but sometimes they're right. Sometimes we get confirmation of which side has the correct perspective, but most of the time we're stuck muddling on through without ever being sure, and that's where good literature comes from.

Kaikeyi is exceptional literature and good storytelling and I can't wait to see what Vaishnai Patel does next.

Toby Ferris' SHORT LIFE IN A STRANGE WORLD: BIRTH TO DEATH IN 42 PANELS (narr by Jot Davies)

Jot Davies is one of those audio book narrators whose name on a project automatically makes that project a likely listen for me, but put him on something like Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, which turns out to be the answer to "what if John Berger and W.G. Sebald were merged into a literary/art historical Brundlefly (and also freakishly made the same allusions to the same cultural touchstones I'm thinking of right as I think of them!) and wrote a book about Breugel the Elder" and that becomes a dead certainty. 

Author Toby Ferris set about the project that gave rise to Short Life in a Strange World after being seized by a "mania for [Pieter] Breugel" as he mourned his recently dead father. Short narratives from that father's life are intertwined with biographical sketches of the author's trip to all of the museums and private collections that possess  definitively proven works of Breugel, and accounts of what is known of Breugel's own life as Ferris minutely observes Breugel's works and the settings in which they exist circa the early 21st century.

Along the way, Ferris winds up writing both lyrically and informatively (the lyricism greatly enhanced by Jot Davies' precise diction and rich and sonorous intonation) about diverse subjects such as the process by which paintings are restored nowadays versus in the 19th and 20th centuries, the aims and ambitions of medieval alchemists, the economic and cultural realities of life in what was, in Bruegel's time, the Spanish Netherlands, the arrangements of modern museums, the English phonetics pose to native speakers of Asian languages (that must have been particularly fun for Davies to narrate), and the occasional wilderness adventure undertaken in the company of Ferris' brother on the author's extended visit to the United States.*

Entertainingly, each chapter begins with a note about how much of the total "Bruegel Object", as calculated by a spreadsheet the author created as he first began contemplating this odd and lovely project, is discussed in that chapter.** From that starting point, Ferris can go in any direction as the imagery in each painting or group of paintings inspires speculation about the change of the seasons, the medieval understanding of death and new life, the difference between painting on wood versus canvas... anything goes, which is where the book most evokes W.G. "Rings of Saturn" Sebald for me and makes me wish Jot Davies could narrate that book someday.

What really stands out for me, though, is an odd little interval late in the book, the short but arresting 11th chapter, "Singularity." Here Ferris pauses to consider a sliver of the "Breugel Object" that has disappeared from public knowledge after being sold at Christie's early this century. This little roundel was a rather recent attribution after careful study with 21st century technology, this as much for its material faithfulness to Breugel's era as for its image, and so Ferris wrestles a bit with how much it should actually bother him that he has no way of seeing the original (the John Berger bit of the Bergbald Brundlefly). It's not part of the canon of classically-understood-to-be-Breugel, after all, and copies, made by one of Breugel's sons and by an engraver that somewhat altered the depicted image to make it more suitable as an engraving, are publicly held where he can see them. Ultimately, concluding that completism is an unrealistic and undue standard for him and his decidedly not academic approach to Breugel, Ferris decides to just let it be, man. After all, he's not trying to hunt down Breugel's drawings or misattributed works, etc, either. Framing matters. 

I, who have several uncompleted "survey all the things" type projects all over this here blog, respect this decision a whole lot, and take a kind of comfort in it, too. I may not get around to reading all of the Doctor Who novels or ever finish my cheeky and irreverent close study of Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, but that doesn't mean that what I've competed of these are worthless for not being 100% COMPLETE COMPLETE COMPLETE. I mean, people wouldn't bug me to resume them if they didn't like what I've done of them so far, right?

And so with this book. While Ferris may have drawn the target around where his arrow hit rather than hitting an objectively established mark, what came of his effort is a lovely meditation on life and death and art, on landscape and memory (hey, Simon Schama!), how material objects such as paintings get scattered around the world,  and on how it feels to be in the same room with a famous masterpiece in our age of image reproduction and reduction. 

What a delightful listen! I think, though, that if I were to read it again, I'd want to sit down with a hardcover edition. The audiobook had an accompanying PDF to allow the listener to examine images of the paintings under discussion, and of course there are any number of ways to look at art on the internet,  but looking at them on the tiny screen of my phone was not very satisfying. As with most art books, of which this is certainly one, the luxury of glossy full color reproductions of the art is highly to be preferred.

But hardcovers don't sound like Jot Davies. Decisions, decisions...

*This is how I wound up having an amusing Twitter conversation about bear spray and, er, used bear chow, with narrator Davies (quite forgetting that the author was still included in the reply chain after Davies had clued him in to my early praise of this book as I was getting started with enjoying it). Sometimes the internet is still a boon to mankind, even in this dumb decade.

**The insights he derives from this supremely nerdy creation of his are weird and amusing. For instance, by Ferris' calculations, 74% of the "Breugel Object" contains a depiction of people in crowds. As someone who spent four years taking all my meals with the famous "Timer" of Phish fame, Zyzzyx, keeper of the Phishstatistics page, I can't help loving attempts like this to quantify art's impact on us. 

Chris F. Holm's CHILD ZERO

Dirty faces peered at Jake and Amy around flimsy doors and dangling tent flaps as they passed. Some looked stricken. Others, suspicious. One woman appeared to Jake as if she were wearing war paint until he realized the lines of white from cheek to jaw were made by falling tears.

William Gibson has contributed a lot to contemporary discourse over the years -- he coined the term "cyberspace" for one -- but the term that serves as our most valuable rhetorical currency these days is The Jackpot, or The Jackpot Years, his vividly descriptive term for humanity's collective experience of multiple existential threats simultaneously, like when a slot machine's wheels (or, nowadays, algorithm- driven simulation of wheels) all come up with the display for the really big prize and an avalanche of coins pours out of the bottom. I guess that's probably virtual now, too? I've never gotten the appeal of gambling so I might be way out of date.

Gibson, anyway, used it as a slang term in dialogue, what characters say to each other as shorthand for a period in their past that Gibson wasn't interested in actually depicting for us. 

In Child Zero, Chris "The Collector" Holm has depicted a version of The Jackpot Years for us, one skewed toward biomedical catastrophe but hey, we still know that things like antibiotic resistance and whatnot are not unrelated to threats that aren't directly biomedical, like anthropogenic climate change and peak oil and good old fashioned pollution. 

In the world of Child Zero, the relationship between drug-resistant disease organisms and climate change gets a direct link in the form of a bacteriophage (basically a virus that attacks bacteria, but also tends to transfer genetic material from other bacteria to its targets, occasionally allowing the rapid spread of, say, a mutation that has allowed one bacterial cell to survive a medical treatment) that was dormant in Siberian permafrost until -- doh! -- we took the "perma" out of the frost and let the phage go on a global gene-swapping spree. This means that suddenly long-ago-defeated diseases like gonorrhea are back with a vengeance, and even a papercut can turn into a septic mess that ends in amputation. We're not quite in the world of The Sheep Look Up, here, but we're definitely Sheep-adjacent. Just, imagine if Austin Train was Elon Musk, greedy egotistical billionaire-on-paper, instead of the gentle scholar who wilfully went into obscurity. 

Also there's a bit of Children of Men mixed in here for good measure, the film more than the novel. In that there is a MacGuffin that is also a person.

Anyway. Making matters much worse for everybody was a bioterror attack in which a madman rigged two major New York City subway stations homemade aerosol devices loaded with the bacteria that causes bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic plague, Aum Shinrikyu style, infecting hundreds with the deadly disease and sending New York into lockdown. The scene described in the pulled quote above takes place in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, renamed "Park City" after it has become a semi-permanent field hospital-cum-internment camp, originally set up as temporary shelter for people who found themselves stranded in NYC without places to sleep, now a grim third world shantytown.

The aformentioned Jake is one of our point of view characters, an NYPD detective whose wife died of the plague and whose daughter, Zoe, is gravely ill and in danger of being swept up by the United States Department of Biological Security, a new bureaucracy straight out of conspiracist fever dreams that purportedly monitors even the most seemingly private communications for any hint of "unreported" illness. Since the death of his wife, Jake has had and broken up with an amazing girlfriend, whom he dumped because she wouldn't succumb to his emotional blackmail and chuck her career as a brilliant surgeon "for the little girl's sake" so he's not the greatest guy ever, but who is in this dirty old world these days (ours or the novel's)? Anyway, lickety split, he and his amazing partner Ameera (aka Amy, the same Amy mentioned in the pulled quote) quickly catch a big bloody massacre of a case and Jake has no choice but to call his ex, Hannah, who's just had the Worst Day Ever at her job trying to Save Lives and Do Surgery without antibiotics, to come babysit and maybe keep Zoe from dying? Pretty please?

For what it's worth, Jake knows he's the asshole here.

While Hannah takes on the task of trying to save Zoe, Jake and Amy have to go to the Sheep Meadow where a massacre has taken place! Over 100 people have been murdered and their bodies burnt, not so much to prevent their being identified because Who Cares but to conceal the fact that all of them were in perfect health. Before long we get a hazy idea of how this came to be -- a hundred internees in a camp full of incurable infection and disease and not so much as a head cold -- and that it relates to a 12 year old El Salvadoran immigrant named Mateo, our human MacGuffin.

From here on out it becomes mostly an escort mission, with Jake's progress hijacked by the need to keep this invaluable kid from falling into the wrong hands; he, Amy, Hannah and by extension Zoe, are now responsible for the safety of the Most Important Person in the World and need to get him to the Good Guys Who Can Help while keeping him safe from, well, everybody else in New York City. This could get hackneyed as hell but Chris Holm is no hack; there are surprises and twists around every corner and everything is expertly handled except...

Well, there's this one thing. Probably just for texture, episodes of the story are intercut with news clippings giving us glimpses of the story of a small band of Above the Law-type desperados who have decided to outfit a fishing boat for deep sea travel (badly) and attempt to sail from Australia to New Zealand to demand "biological asylum." It's a premise that would make a fine whole 'nother novel but its presence in Child Zero didn't quite work for me, because it has nothing to do with Child Zero's story. I kept expecting it to tie in to the larger narrative somehow but nope, it's just there for color. This may irritate other readers less than it did me, but I think most of my readers (who have made my still-incomplete Suns Suns Suns series the most read pages on this blog by a very significant margin; i.e., Gene Wolfe fans or wannabe fans or almost-fans) are the sort who will be annoyed by this at least as much as I, if not more so.

But really, just as Jake's mistake with Hannah makes him as a character and their relationship as it evolves much more interesting, this flaw in Child Zero must stand as a minor one. After all, it does point to the larger world and the plight of everybody else who isn't a New Yorker. And that's not nothing.