More Aliens, More Politics, More Fun: Tade Thompson – The Rosewater Insurrection

One of the joys of literary awards is that they can lead you to new and interesting books. Books you would otherwise have overlooked, books you weren’t aware of, books you thought were about something completely different. Thanks to the 2020 Best Series Hugo Award, I finally picked up Rosewater by Tade Thompson and was so mesmerized that I had to continue the trilogy in what, for me, is actually a pretty prompt manner.

THE ROSEWATER INSURRECTION
by Tade Thompson

Published: Orbit, 2019
eBook: 400 pages
audiobook: 13 hours 13 minutes
Series: The Wormwood Trilogy #2
My rating: 7.5/10

Opening line: I am not an assassin. I’d like that to be clear, yet I am cleaning my gun as I start this telling, having already stripped and cleaned my rifle, with the intention of killing a man. Orders.

All is quiet in the city of Rosewater as it expands on the back of the gargantuan alien Wormwood. Those who know the truth of the invasion keep the secret.

The government agent Aminat, the lover of the retired sensitive Kaaro, is at the forefront of the cold, silent conflict. She must capture a woman who is the key to the survival of the human race. But Aminat is stymied by the machinations of the Mayor of Rosewater and the emergence of an old enemy of Wormwood…

Where Rosewater was told solely from the point of view of Kaaro, a sensitive and an agent for the secret government branch S45, this second book only spares a few chapters for him. Instead, we get alternating chapters from the POV of Aminat whom we’ve met in the first book and who works for S45 under Femi Alaagomeji, the mayor of Rosewater, Jack Jacques, Antony, and some more new characters. So this is a clear departure from the storytelling style of the first book but if anything, it made this volume easier to breeze through, much easier to follow (no multiple time lines), and it helped show new aspects of Rosewater and its particular style of alien invasion.

As we learned in the first book, aliens have already successfully invaded Earth using fungi which live inside humans with very little effect on us. Except some, like Kaaro, have been turned into so-called sensitives and can enter the xenosphere. Every human is a certain percentace fungus at this point, and Femi, Aminat’s S45 boss, is trying to find a way to reverse this. Aminat’s job is to find people with a particularly low percentage of fungus, when she stumbles across a woman who appears to be more alien than human, something unheard of. This woman, Alyssa, is actually experiencing severe amnesia. She doesn’t know who she is, only that she’s not the wife and mother her husband and child seem to think she is…

Meanwhile, Jack Jacques, the mayor of Rosewater, declares the city’s independence which leads to a whole shit show of conflict, both within Rosewater and in Nigeria. The president gest involved, there’s unrest in the streets, and something is happening in the alien biodome. So you could say, things get a little out of hand.

I loved Rosewater for its fresh ideas and its complicated and not super likable protagonist, but I have to say, I appreciated the multiple POVs here a lot. Not only did it give me characters to like as well as dislike, but it also offered different perspectives for the same event. When things go down in Rosewater andthe mayor is secure, watching things from a safe distance, Aminat is right in the middle of the action. It was a lot of fun reading about the same events unfolding from different points of view.
It also helps establishing the female characters as more than how Kaaro sees them. If you felt that the first book was a bit misogynistic in tone, I can’t really disagree, but I interpreted is as Kaaro being Kaaro. And Kaaro is a little fixated on women’s looks, especially boobs. Since Kaaro only gets a few chapters in The Rosewater Insurrection, women aren’t described in quite so much male gaze-y detail here, although Thompson still makes a point of letting us know how gorgeous Femi is and how everyone either wants her or wants to look like her. However, these mentions weren’t nearly as frequent as in the first book and women are the ones carrying this story forward for the most part, so I was okay with it.

As for the world building and the science ficitonal ideas – they were still great, but for a while I thought the trilogy had run out of steam. The xenosphere had already been introduced in Rosewater, a cool twist about the alien Wormwood had been revealed, and it didn’t feel like Thompson could come up with something intriguing enough to keep the world building fresh in this middle volume. Well, it may not be a completely new idea but I did love where he took this story. The type of alien and its plans in particular are a refreshing change to what we usually see in TV or the movies. Without giving things away, I can’t really tell you more details, but there’s new conflict and the alien situation becomes way more difficult than it was already.

Another thing I appreciate is how Thompson not only throws cool ideas into his story for the sake of having them there, but he incorporates them so that they each are improtant for the story he wants to tell. The xenosphere, for example, isn’t just there. It plays a vital part in the plot of this trilogy, as do the fungus, the reanimates, S45, and of course Wormwood’s own agenda. It all comes together really nicely and, in the case of Insurrecion, also quite violently, which gives us an exciting ending, filled with action. The ending, like in some of the best books, is also filled with hope. After I finished this book, I was pretty sure that the protagonists I was rooting for were doing the right thing, but if I’m completely honest, I can’t really know. In the third books, it could turn out that humanity has made a huge mistake. I just don’t know yet. Endings I can’t predict are my very favorites, so I’m super excited to read The Rosewater Redemption and see how things end for Aminat, Kaaro, and humanity in general. Seriously, it could go either way.