Happy First Wednesday of July! And happy First Wednesday of the Month Book Blog Post!   Today I shall introduce you to Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.  It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2011, and is a fantasy book accidentally chosen (not by me) for my sci-fi book club.  Mostly, I will tell you that Zoo City rules!

Zoo City takes place in an alternate today, or possibly tomorrow.  But not long from now – everything about the world is recognizable.  It has a few things going for it right off the bat:

– Female protagonist
– Not about white people *gasp*
– Takes place in Africa (unusual in the fantasy/sci-fi world)
– It doesn’t read like “white person writing book ostensibly about black people”
– It’s “fantasy” without reading like fantasy

Zoo City follows a few days or weeks in the life of Zinzi December a totally awesome protagonist who almost lost me in the first few chapters because she wore “a cute vintage dress over jeans”.   Luckily, that fashion mishap was a one-time affair.

In the Zoo City world, there are people who are “animaled”.  These people have done something terrible, they have horrible guilt about it, and as a result they have a living, breathing, animal to which they are physically and mentally bonded.   There is a disagreement between myself and my other book group members: they think that you get an animal when you kill someone, I think it just has to be something very bad.  (I am correct, BTW, but read the book and frame your argument. I’d love to hear it!)

There is a . . . force, or entity, or fear, known as “the undertow” which is related to the animals.   When you do something terrible, the undertow comes for you – it is a form of hell made up of the shadows that surround you.  I believe the shadows are a manifestation of crippling horror and guilt at your actions – but this is never explained.  The animal manifests from the shadows when the undertow comes for you, and the animal acts as a buffer between the animaled and the undertow.  Animals simply appear after an event, and they are yours forever. If your animal is killed, the undertow comes for you.  Zinzi December has a sloth.   (I swear the book refers to it as a monkey, but maybe they are being clever and referring to her previous drug addiction as a monkey on her back and not Sloth.)

People with animals also have a magic power or “shavi”.  Zinzi’s shavi is finding lost things – she sees threads running from people to items they’ve lost, and she traces them down for cash.  But not lost people.  That’s messy and she wants no part of it.  In the Zoo City world, people with animals have all the troubles you would expect –particularly difficulty finding housing and jobs.  The animal is like a big felony you can never get expunged and can’t hide.   So, the animaled congregate in poor broken down neighborhoods called, unsurprisingly, “zoo cities”.  Individuals are derogatorily referred to as “zoos”.   This form of discrimination plays into an interesting and semi-questionable moral high ground.   The “zoos” have, proof positive, done something terrible.  Isn’t it ok to discriminate against them?   We think it’s ok to keep felons out of our jobs or our houses – why not zoos?

The animals, the premise of them, make the book.  I love that they are not anthropomorphized – they are very definitively animals.  They understand a lot of what’s going on with their person and they have magic about them, but they are animals that just exist and do animal things.  They are a responsibility, and a protection, and a visible burden of shame.   Sloth is also cute and cuddly, at least in my head!

On the downside, or maybe neutral side, the book reads like a first-time novel.  The imagery is overly simile-heavy – “it was as hot as” “the night dripped steam like” “his skin was ____ like _______” – as if someone told the author to be sure to evoke imagery and pull the readers in.  Some imagery is great – too much pulls you back out of the experience.  That being said – it reads like a damn-good first-time novel!  (Upon further research, the book is her second novel.  I’ll be sure to read her first novel Moxyland soon. In fact, I’ve downloaded it to my Kindle – under $5!)

The true “plot” of the book is a mystery (not a mystery to me, but an honest-to-goodness what happened to thing X?!) – but that’s secondary to the world and the people in it.   And that’s lucky because I swear the plot just goes haywire at a certain point – I remember being all into it, reading along super-fast, and then thinking “wow. I have no idea what’s going on!” But I wanted to keep going! And I did!  I actually read the book a second time and if I really think it through carefully I could probably explain what happened.  But I won’t, because it’s the climax.  And you should just read it yourself!

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