Book review: Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler
Jun. 3rd, 2010 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroyPrint date: 1984 (20s: 1, 60s: 2, 70s: 2, 80s: 4, 90s: 3, 00s: 6)
This is a hard book. It's tiny and it reads quickly, but it deals with violence, family, compulsion, emotion, prejudice, and sex. The set-up is this: an astronaut comes home with an alien virus that changes the host physically and psychologically to preserve and propagate itself. The primary struggle of the book is how the infected deal with it while they're trying to cling to their humanity... and what that even means.
It's a powerful story. It doesn't end happily. The desperation of the characters bleeds through every page. I wasn't quite shell-shocked when I put it down, but I definitely needed a few moments afterward. And writing this review is hard, because what the book made me feel is hard.
This is not a book to be taken lightly and it is not by any means an escape. But it is also one of those books that I cannot explain in less time than it would take you to read it, and that is exceedingly rare.
Verdict: Keep. (10.5/28 keepers)
Page count: 213 (6584 total)
Completed: 18 (9 female authors, 9 male authors)
Rejected: 10 (5 male authors, 5 female authors)
Next book due: 6/16
This is a hard book. It's tiny and it reads quickly, but it deals with violence, family, compulsion, emotion, prejudice, and sex. The set-up is this: an astronaut comes home with an alien virus that changes the host physically and psychologically to preserve and propagate itself. The primary struggle of the book is how the infected deal with it while they're trying to cling to their humanity... and what that even means.
It's a powerful story. It doesn't end happily. The desperation of the characters bleeds through every page. I wasn't quite shell-shocked when I put it down, but I definitely needed a few moments afterward. And writing this review is hard, because what the book made me feel is hard.
This is not a book to be taken lightly and it is not by any means an escape. But it is also one of those books that I cannot explain in less time than it would take you to read it, and that is exceedingly rare.
Verdict: Keep. (10.5/28 keepers)
Page count: 213 (6584 total)
Completed: 18 (9 female authors, 9 male authors)
Rejected: 10 (5 male authors, 5 female authors)
Next book due: 6/16