How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.

This one started off very promising to me, and kind of fizzled out a bit further into it. I really like the structure of this book, it's a series of short stories told as vignettes from different characters, but all within the same world and timeline. (It's also a pandemic story, although a fantastical one, but that might be off-putting to some).

There are a few stories near the beginning that were incredibly engrossing. I'll try to keep it vague and it will sound silly, but one is about a euthanasia theme park and another is about a talking pig. These are complete stories, well told, and are actually quite heartwrenching.

I think I may try rereading this at some point, I listened to the audiobook and it's possible I just wasn't in the mindset to pay property attention to the latter parts of the book, but they just didn't hold my attention as much and by the end I was a bit unsatisfied. Still worth reading for the high points though.

More science-fictiony than I expected, but also very intricate and moving.

I heard such great things about this book, although I do not remember now where I heard that. I had high hopes and was sadly disappointed.

I had just read The Wrack which was a similar concept of interconnected stories, all with different characters about the same event or happening. That story was also about a pandemic and at first, they were very similar. However, where those stories had lots of emotion and depth I felt these were very superficial. Especially in the beginning, all the stories were very sad but they didn't actually make me feel anything. They were just tragic in the most basic ways.

Some of the stories also felt very out of context and not at all relevant to the whole story. Like the talking pig. It was trying to be too much and the quality between stories varied wildly. A Gallery a Century, a Cry a Millennium, for instance, was great although again with too little depth in my opinion. The timelines were also very different as well. And the last chapter felt like a tack-on to connect all the stories because they weren't connected enough by themselves.

This jumbled collection of disconnected stories is too ambitious for its own good and didn't do the hype justice.

CW: pandemic, child euthanasia, cancer

From the first time I read the premise of this book, I knew I had to read it. I went as far as preordering the audiobook which is something I rarely do. It took me a couple weeks after the release to get to it but I am happy all my anticipation wasn't in vain.

This is not a spoiler because it's mentioned in the blurb but this is a book about the aftermath of a pandemic - not something novel like Covid-19 but an ancient one that gets released into our world when the ice starts melting in Siberia. The symptoms of this disease were very different from the one we are experiencing, so I think that's why I was able to disassociate myself from our reality and enjoy this one purely as a near future sci-fi novel. And it was so fascinating. This is a collection of stories of different people - what each person is going through in the months and years after the pandemic, how their lives and surroundings have changed, what has become important and what has been relegated as trivial in this new world, how communities and philosophies have evolved, and how everyone is coping while trying to survive as well as while making very difficult decisions.

What was surprising was how the author connected each of these stories with some small reference or just a word and it was a marvelous feeling when I could connect the threads from the beginning to the end. And that revelation in the final chapter is a perfect capstone to this unique and fascinating world. Because of the pandemic as the major catalyst of this book, it's understandable that death is a major theme across the board. We see every single character as well as communities and countries dealing with death in different ways, developing new ways to honor the people who have gone and creating some new funerary rituals along the way. And as with any disaster, capitalism is always ready to commercialize even this somber point of humanity. But what really surprised as well as awed me was that despite there being so much death in the book, the author manages to infuse the stories with so much love, family and hope - so, even when you are feeling the immense grief the characters are experiencing, you are also rooting for them to survive and appreciating their efforts to move on and do better.

I had thought this book would take me a while to finish because of its subject matter but I finished it in day. I have to credit the excellent cast of narrators who brought each of the characters to life and let me experience their grief and loss and hope through their narrations. And I know the premise of this book can be a deterrent during our current times, but I would still recommend it because it's a sober and poignant look at the possibilities of humanity's survival in a climate/pandemic ravaged world and more importantly a call to all of us to preserve the only way of life we know.