Lesbian Fiction/PoC Author: Adaptation by Malinda Lo
I had high hopes for Malinda Lo's Adaptation. Ash and Huntress were very good with the potential to be great, and I was hoping Lo would be one of those writers who really learns to write by the third book. I did read Adaptation in one quick sitting, but I was disappointed in it, and more so the more I think about it.
Reese Holloway, her debate partner David Li, and their debate coach Mr. Chapman are waiting for a delayed flight home from nationals in Phoenix when the news begins reporting on plane crashes caused by flocks of birds. When all flights are grounded, they rent a car and start driving back to San Francisco. Mr. Chapman dies in an attempted carjacking in Las Vegas, and Reese and David continue on without him. In the middle of the Nevada desert, a bird flies straight at their car. Reese swerves to avoid it, crashes, and wakes up twenty-seven days later in a classified medical facility. She and David are given non-disclosure agreements to sign and sent home. Reese experiences occasional bouts of touch-triggered empathy, has headaches when she thinks too hard about what happened, dreams about a round yellow room with bleeding walls, and meets Amber Gray, who she's instantly attracted to and starts dating despite her resolve not to date.
The basic structural problem with the book is the same as the problem with Ash and Huntress: the story Lo seems to be setting up and the story she tells at the end are not the same story. The book reads like it's going to be a government experimentation conspiracy, and in many ways it is. But then there are aliens. They're barely foreshadowed; sure, there's a lot of talk about Area 51, but that's so mainstream in conspiracy sci fi that it doesn't necessarily point to aliens. I wanted what happened to Reese and David to be terrestrial science, not alien gene splicing.
Amber turns out to be one of the aliens, and Reese notes that she looks just like a human. There's a moment in the book perfectly set up for Amber to explain why that is, but Lo misses it, and I was deeply skeptical about alien morphology matching human so well without explanation. There was other science that didn't make sense either. For example, there are a couple of explosions that I didn't believe would happen that easily. The birds are also a problem. In response to the plane crashes, the government starts killing birds. There's mention of animal rights groups protesting, but the only mention of what kind of effect removing birds will have on the ecosystem is Reese noticing that there are no pigeons pecking at the dropped crumbs of a muffin. The birds are additionally something of a loose end. They play such a pivotal role in the story that I expected more of an explanation than the short resolution that they were the result of experimentation with alien DNA hybridization to make them smarter.
There are other awkward spots in the book that could have been smoothed out by a better editor. Many of the character introductions are clunky. Reese refers to a freeway as "the I-10," when using the "the" in front of freeway names is a Southern California thing. Reese continually uses "The Hub," which I think is supposed to be a Facebook analog, but which doesn't have enough of a description for me to be sure exactly what it's supposed to be. Reese makes herself eggs and then can't eat them with the implication that the flashback is making her sick, but she never explicitly likens the yellow room to an egg. Individually, these all seem like small things, but that also means they're all things that could have been easily fixed to make the book that much better.
I will probably read the sequel when it's published because this was such a fast read, and because the aliens, at least, won't be an unwelcome surprise. I might even like it better because I won't go into it with such high hopes.
I do have a copy of the book, so if anyone wants to read it for themselves, let me know and I will send it to you.
Reese Holloway, her debate partner David Li, and their debate coach Mr. Chapman are waiting for a delayed flight home from nationals in Phoenix when the news begins reporting on plane crashes caused by flocks of birds. When all flights are grounded, they rent a car and start driving back to San Francisco. Mr. Chapman dies in an attempted carjacking in Las Vegas, and Reese and David continue on without him. In the middle of the Nevada desert, a bird flies straight at their car. Reese swerves to avoid it, crashes, and wakes up twenty-seven days later in a classified medical facility. She and David are given non-disclosure agreements to sign and sent home. Reese experiences occasional bouts of touch-triggered empathy, has headaches when she thinks too hard about what happened, dreams about a round yellow room with bleeding walls, and meets Amber Gray, who she's instantly attracted to and starts dating despite her resolve not to date.
The basic structural problem with the book is the same as the problem with Ash and Huntress: the story Lo seems to be setting up and the story she tells at the end are not the same story. The book reads like it's going to be a government experimentation conspiracy, and in many ways it is. But then there are aliens. They're barely foreshadowed; sure, there's a lot of talk about Area 51, but that's so mainstream in conspiracy sci fi that it doesn't necessarily point to aliens. I wanted what happened to Reese and David to be terrestrial science, not alien gene splicing.
Amber turns out to be one of the aliens, and Reese notes that she looks just like a human. There's a moment in the book perfectly set up for Amber to explain why that is, but Lo misses it, and I was deeply skeptical about alien morphology matching human so well without explanation. There was other science that didn't make sense either. For example, there are a couple of explosions that I didn't believe would happen that easily. The birds are also a problem. In response to the plane crashes, the government starts killing birds. There's mention of animal rights groups protesting, but the only mention of what kind of effect removing birds will have on the ecosystem is Reese noticing that there are no pigeons pecking at the dropped crumbs of a muffin. The birds are additionally something of a loose end. They play such a pivotal role in the story that I expected more of an explanation than the short resolution that they were the result of experimentation with alien DNA hybridization to make them smarter.
There are other awkward spots in the book that could have been smoothed out by a better editor. Many of the character introductions are clunky. Reese refers to a freeway as "the I-10," when using the "the" in front of freeway names is a Southern California thing. Reese continually uses "The Hub," which I think is supposed to be a Facebook analog, but which doesn't have enough of a description for me to be sure exactly what it's supposed to be. Reese makes herself eggs and then can't eat them with the implication that the flashback is making her sick, but she never explicitly likens the yellow room to an egg. Individually, these all seem like small things, but that also means they're all things that could have been easily fixed to make the book that much better.
I will probably read the sequel when it's published because this was such a fast read, and because the aliens, at least, won't be an unwelcome surprise. I might even like it better because I won't go into it with such high hopes.
I do have a copy of the book, so if anyone wants to read it for themselves, let me know and I will send it to you.