Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes
Title: Zoo City
Series: Stand-Alone
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Angry Robot
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Year: 2010
Pages: 366
Genre: Fantasy
Subgenres: Urban Fantasy, Thriller
Challenge Information: Fantasy Challenge category "Read a novel set in or dealing with the myths of a Southern Hemisphere culture"; Mystery Challenge category "Read a novel set in Africa"
Full Disclosure: I know zilch about South Africa or African politics.
Jacket Description
Zinzi December has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she's forced to take on her least favourite kind of job: missing persons.
My Review
I feel relentlessly neutral about this book.
I wanted to like it. I think the premise is really cool: it takes place in the near future, but a near future that resulted from the "Zoo Plague" in the 90s, which subsequently caused every person who commits a crime to be given both a magical talent and an animal companion, visible evidence of that person's guilt. It's set in Johannesburg, South Africa, a setting I am not familiar with but am curious about. And it has a black female protagonist, something incredibly rare in SF/F (though not so far on my blog, since Zinzi is my second in as many weeks).
I did not end up disliking it, which is nice. There was absolutely nothing about it that I thought was badly done, or which I found offensive. It had style, and the insertion of extra-narrative documents like book excerpts and movie descriptions and tabloid articles worked for me. It read quickly, all the characters were realistically drawn, and while the various plot strands were tidied up nicely in the ending, the characters' lives were clearly not -- suitable for the vaguely dystopian feel.
But I did not like it either. I think I may just have maxed out my tolerance for noir-influenced novels, and the uniqueness of having a black heroine instead of a white hero, and magic-babble instead of techno-babble, was not enough to save this one for me. I simply cannot relate to any more characters who have no attachments to anyone or anything; it is too profoundly selfish a world-view for my tastes, no matter what damage is in the character's past.
That said, Beukes did some interesting things, things that I think I would have liked more if I were in a better frame of mind for this book. The question of what causes a person to be given an animal, thrown out in little asides, piqued my interest, and overall I'm glad it wasn't answered definitively. And the ending was such a subversion of the tropes of the genre that it took me 24 hours to get over my huffiness and appreciate it for what it is.
So overall. . . neutral. But I think I would enjoy it some other time, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes noir.
My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★1/2
Read this for: The world-building
Don't read this for: The mystery
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Every other noir I've read in the past couple years: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan; The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds; Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon; Neuromancer, by William Gibson; Yarn, by Jon Armstrong.
Will I read more by this author? Maybe