altlovesbooks

"The river can be such a simple girl, but most lovely when she's unadorned."

I clearly didn't get whatever everyone else got out of this book. I thought the setup was interesting, an aging woman escorting a houseboat full of artistic types against the backdrop of a society in flux. Art in almost all forms is disappearing, there's a plague causing people to vanish, armed uprisings, a whole host of things going wrong on the mainland, but on the river there's just them on a weird journey. After taking the wrong branch of the river they start seeing increasingly bizarre sights and stop in towns with unusual afflictions. The Land of Doze where the crew feel exhausted all the time, the Island of Lost Children, a Lord-of-the-Fliesesque town of children where everyone thinks its 1993 instead of 2033, and a whole host of bizarre encounters on the river.

Honestly, this felt a bit like The Phantom Tollbooth, but with tougher to parse allegories. Each encounter the group aboard Silver Lady runs into felt like it had some sort of deeper meaning or allusion to something, but without more to go on I wasn't able to really get anything out of it. The dystopian society the group is on vacation from isn't really reflected in the story itself beyond mention of how unsafe the world outside the river is, and a constant fear that the art they're making aboard is going to vanish. There's also a lack of a through thread tying everything together, making it hard for me to really stay invested in a story that didn't seem like it was going anywhere. The author also shoehorns in mention of Qigong any chance she can get.

I don't know, there's enough reviews out there to make me think I clearly missed something, but I didn't really enjoy this trip downriver.

I won a copy of this eBook through Goodreads Giveaways.