I’m so glad I picked this up. I’ve been hearing about this trilogy ever since the first book came out but reviews were all over the place. Some people loved it, some hated it, some said it was too difficult to understand – that’s exactly the right mix to get me super interested and want to form an opinion of my own. It was difficult to read and it’s definitely only the start of a longer story but, boy, did I love it!
ROSEWATER
by Tade Thompson
Published: Apex Book Company, 2016
Audiobook: 13 hours 30 minutes
Paperback: 432 pages
Series: The Wormwood Trilogy #1
My rating: 8/10
Opening line: I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in.
Tade Thompson’s Rosewater is the start of an award-winning, cutting edge trilogy set in Nigeria, by one of science fiction’s most engaging new voices.
Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.
Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.
This is a crazy book with many ideas, several timelines, different planes of existence, and an interesting cast of characters. We follow Kaaro, a former thief turned government agent, who is also infected with xenoforms that let him enter the xenosphere – a sort of parallel world of thoughts. He can read people’s thoughts and feelings which is pretty useful for his secret work for the government agency Section 45. His day job is working at a bank, trying to deter other sensitives (others like him) from reading people’s passcodes or bank data from their minds. He does this by crowding the xenosphere with unimportant thoughts, usually reading a classic novel.
Whew! That’s just the basic introduction and you can see there’s already so much packed in there. So I have to agree with the people that say this isn’t an easy book to read. The writing style is great, the prose flows smoothly, but keeping everything straight in your head, keeping up with what happened to Kaaro during which time period – it takes a bit of work.
His first person narrative jumps between the present, 2066, and the past, mostly 2055 but sometimes other times in between. Kaaro lives in Rosewater, a city that has grown around an alien biodome that sometimes grants healing powers to those in its vicinity and which is also responsible for sensitives.
Discovering just what this science fictional future Nigeria is like was so much fun. Again, it takes some work to keep things straight in your head while you read this book but it is utterly rewarding. On the one hand, I wanted to learn more about who Kaaro is. When we first meet him, he seems somewhat depressed, not really knowing where to go with his life. When he is set up with beautiful young Aminat, he has something to hold on to again. Through the flashback chapters, we learn more about his criminal past, about how Rosewater came to be, and about how he started working for S45. I’m keeping all the details out and just letting you know that the fog that you may feel at the beginning of this book will slowly lift.
There was very little I didn’t like in this book. The cast of characters is interesting and varied, Kaaro himself is a diffulct and flawed protagonist but I actually really liked him. He is strangely focused on women’s looks and highly sexualizes any woman he comes into contact with but, in general, he’s a good guy who grows throughout the novel.
I also enjoyed the writing style. With Kaaro’s trips into the xenosphere, things can get a bit confusing because – as you can imagine – a world of thought doesn’t exactly follow Earth rules. In the xenosphere, Kaaro is a gryphon, physics don’t apply, but you can still run into all sorts of danger.
Probably the most intriguing part was the whole alien thing, though. The way this novel plays out, people have just come to accept the various changes alien life has brought to Earth. The biodome is visited by many, especially the old, the sick, or people who think they are broken in some way and hope to be “fixed”. The existance of Sensitives is also well-known by everyone. In order to ward them off, people use anti-fungal cream and techniques like Kaaro’s at his bank job.
I don’t really want to tell you anything about the plot (or plots, plural) because part of the fun here is finding out how everything is connected and how it all fits together at the end. In the prestent, Kaaro discovers that Sensitives seem to be dying and he’s trying to figure out what is happening to them. Are they being murdered? Does it have to do with the xenoforms and do they give them all some sort of disease? In the flashback chapters, we see some of Kaaro’s previous missions, some of which give us glimpses into politics and the alien biodome. I admit it can feel like reading several separate stories at times, but by the end, everything comes together and we get the whole puzzle. And the puzzle is just the beginning of a probably much larger tale – this is only part one of a trilogy, after all.
The nature of this book makes it very hard to talk about. It is best to be experience. I used an Audible credit for the audiobook and I can highly recommend it. It’s narrated by Bayo Gbadamosi and he does a fantastic job! Not only was it nice to hear how some of the names are pronounced but Gbadamosi also creates so much atmosphere. When Kaaro is freaked out by something, it absolutely shows in the narrative, giving me a sense of anxiety and completely immersing me in the story.
I highly enjoyed this book and have books two and three lined up and ready to go. It’s like Thompson took certain ideas and tropes that may have been there before but combined and twisted them into something that feels utterly fresh and new. It has a noir feeling to it, it’s definitely weird, it’s science fiction, and it’s about a man figuring out what to do with his life. And also there’s aliens… Mashing so many things into one book shouldn’t work but it totall does. I am hooked and can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy and anything else Tade Thompson writes!
MY RATING: 8/10 – Excellent
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