Publication Date: November 14, 2017
Publisher: Harper
Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling,
National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The
Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her
life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake
of a cataclysmic event.
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has
reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop
the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants
that appear to be primitive species of humans.
Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted
daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as
disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this
change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who
raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother,
Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her
baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society
around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of
humanity.
There are rumors of martial law, of Congress
confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these
wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing
repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police
violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The
streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger
answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished
without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of
potential informants and keep her baby safe.
A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and
prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly
original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on
female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to
the troubling changes of our time.
“The first
thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is
happening.”
“Don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal
and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.”
“Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right
along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets.
We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.”
Louise Erdrich’s new book is obviously compared to
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale because
of the dystopian development in the United States that leads to a government
that has taken complete control of women's lives, defining them as childbearers
and regulating their pregnancies and the fates of their children. However, to
me, The Future Home of the Living God
did not measure up to Margaret Atwood. I read a lot of Erdrich in college and I
must say that I feel this book was lacking a lot of her usual lyrical writing
style and quality. There were several holes in the plot and some of the
characters lacked depth and development. I loved the concept of the story, but
kept comparing it to Atwood’s dystopian novel, and they just did not match up.
What kept me intrigued and drew me in the most
while reading was Cedar’s character and her daily journal entries to her unborn
baby. They were mystifying at times and really put life into perspective for
me. Cedar is seeking her own biological parents throughout the novel; I wish
all of the characters were as fleshed out as Cedar. Her journey and struggle
with identity is incredible and really builds a great theme for the novel as a
whole. Not only do I wish that the rest of the characters held more detail, I also
wish that Erdrich would have spent more time on the development of this
dystopian world. I felt that not enough time was spent here, but Cedar and her
unborn child are definitely enough to give this book a try if you are a lover
of dystopian fiction.
***A free copy of this book was provided to me by the
publishers at Harper in exchange for my honest review***
Books like this are very good but also chilling in that it seems that they could actually happen...
ReplyDeleteKate @ Ex Libris