The Girl in the Road

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

This book is essentially a road trip story. We meet the main character Meena as she is running away from her home (in India) and going on a journey to Djibouti to find out what happened to her parents. She does this by walking across a 3000 km bridge connecting Mumbai and Djibouti. But this isn't really a bridge, and she isn't really meant to be on it. It's a series of interconnecting scales crossing the Arabian Sea which uses the waves to collect kinetic energy and turn it into electricity.

I think the thing I enjoyed most about this book is it's diversity. The main character is Indian. It deals with racism between Indians and Africans. It's very open about sexuality, the main character being pansexual. It also has a trans character, I quite liked that nothing was made of it. Just oh this person is now a woman no big deal. It even touches on problems like how do you do the toilet in the middle of the ocean and what is this character going to do about her periods since she is almost certainly going to have one while on this journey. This is one thing that has really started to annoy me about sci-fi, most of it is written by men, most of it is about white people (also usually men) so it's really nice to finally come across a sci-fi book that does something different.

The only thing that let this book down was the epilogue. Simply because it was confusing and left more questions than answers. You could actually not read the epilogue and still get full, if not more enjoyment out of this book. Basically if I have to go search the internet to find out what's going on in the epilogue it's not a good epilogue. But I liked everything else.

Love futuristic novels that actually tell stories about people instead of focusing on the technological novelties of the future. (Not that it lacks technological novelties!) Byrne paints a future where India and Africa are the new hotspots of culture, development and conflict. Gender, sexuality, language, culture, realities merge and clash. And women, there are women everywhere! The story is fascinating and intriguing, yet never reaches the level I wished it would. The journey on the bridge itself almost has “Inverted World” and “Woman In The Dunes” mind-messing qualities. The ending is intentionally left ambiguous by the author.