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On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
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On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
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On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
Audiobook11 hours

On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

Written by Chang-rae Lee

Narrated by BD Wong

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

"Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. . . . With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart."-Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review

"I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?"-Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times

From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America.


On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.

In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.

In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.

Editor's Note

Quietly devastating...

This eerie dystopian novel walks the fine line between escapism and realism with grace, making the reminders of the precariousness of our world more palatable, if no less devastating.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 7, 2014
ISBN9780698136052
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On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
Author

Chang-rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee (1965), nació en Corea del Sur y emigró a los Estados Unidos con su familia cuando tenía tres años. Su primera novela, En lengua materna, publicada en esta colección, fue premiada con el PEN Hemingway Award, el Oregon Book Award y el American Book Award, entre otros galardones, mientras que las revistas The New Yorker y Granta lo destacaron como uno de los más prometedores escritores del nuevo siglo.«Una novela vigorosa y poética que llega hasta la raíz de aquello en lo que indaga... Excelente» (Marcos Giralt Torrente, El País); «Escritura especialmente afilada y perturbadora» (Manuel Ollé, ABC). Con su segunda novela, Una vida de gestos, se consagró como una de las voces más originales y ambiciosas de la literatura norteamericana contemporánea: «La angustia y el esplendor de una prosa que fluye sin desmayo, apretada de significaciones y consoladora como el sueño de opio que trata de espantar el acoso de una pesadilla» (Juan Manuel de Prada, ABC); «Muchos críticos le han comparado a Kazuo Ishiguro. Un nuevo valor seguro en la literatura contemporánea» (Isabel Núñez, La Vanguardia). Desde las alturas es su tercera novela: «La primera novela suya que me engullo, y debo decir que, a partir de ahora, me cuento entre sus seguidores más fieles. Altísima temperatura literaria. La prosa, magnífica. A Lee le han comparado con Updike. Por derecho propio ya forma parte de la pléyade de los más grandes» (Jordi Llavina); «La cristalina prosa de un joven maestro» (Rodrigo Fresán, Página 12).

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Reviews for On Such a Full Sea

Rating: 3.550877192982456 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

285 ratings40 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a hard one to review. I loved the plot, but the style left me kind of cold. It was a slog to get through even though I really wanted to know what happened. Lee used the first person plural a lot, as if speaking for the whole community of B-Mor. He also started a ton of sentences with "for" and "perhaps," which seemed to make it slow. Perhaps we thought this, perhaps some of us thought that, who knows? I often wanted him to get on with the story of Fan and Reg and say less about the community of B-Mor's whimsical meta-feelings. The story of Fan in the Counties and then in Seneca, a Charter town, was pretty great. I like some of Lee's language very much. He formulates expressions of human madness, individual and en masse, that are trenchant and unique. At one point, looking for a way to act out, the people of B-Mor spontaneously trash one of their beautiful koi ponds. The community is run by a company called the directorate and the people have no say in the rules or laws. "B-mor works because we work" is one of their many slogans. The people in B-Mor grow and supply fish and fresh produce to the Charter village nearby.Another major theme is the environment and cancer caused by it. Everyone has cancer, and while they have better treatment for it than we have now, it is still an eventual death sentence. Big Pharmacological Companies are at the top of the power structure and they don't actually want to cure "C," as it's called, because they make more money if they don't. There is a dark conspiracy around this. Lee is good at not giving everything away and telling just enough to let you figure things out gradually. So in short, plot excellent, writing slow, but with definitely cool moments.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic journey story. Beautifully written, great narration. Highly recommend it!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a very experimental dystopian novel, but the narrative style and emphasis on descriptions didn't work so well for me. This was just okay.

    10/27/17 update: this was a richer reading experience than I remember. The end is especially so, when we consider homosocial female friendships. I'm pleased to discover that this will fit in nicely to my research project.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book's stratified, dystopian world pulled me in. I felt like I was out meeting the same troubled characters along with Fan. A little slow but I found learning more about B-Mor and seeing how Fan inspired its Denizens to be rewarding.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The most ridiculous book I've ever read. DNF
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I love the book itself, but I find the persistently unusual intonation of the reader detracts significantly from the overall effect. I'm going to read it myself.
    Five stars for the book, one star for the reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I think it's best to think of this book as a philosophical rumination on today's world, and that the rumination had taken form in Fan's journey. It is decidedly not a typical dystopian novel; lovers of that genre should be aware before using a credit.

    That being said, this might have been one of the best books (and best narration) I have read/heard. I loved it so much I bought a hard copy of the book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Moment to moment we act freely, we make decisions and form opinions and there is very little to throttle us. We think each of us has a map marked with private routings and preferred habitual destinations, and go by a legend of our own. Yet it turns out you can overlay them and see a most amazing correspondence, what you believed were very personal contours aligning not exactly but enough that while our via points may diverge, our endings do not."

    This month's post-apocalyptic book club selection.

    B-Mor, formerly Baltimore, is a tightly-knit but regimented community of workers. They are the descendants of people from an ecologically devastated China, brought to a declining America to produce goods for the wealthy, who live in walled Charter communities.

    One of the residents of B-Mor is Fan, a young woman, seemingly a model worker and citizen, who unexpectedly leaves the community and ventures alone into the dangerous 'open counties' after her boyfriend 'disappears.'

    The novel alternates between telling Fan's story, and having an unnamed narrator, a B-Mor resident, philosophize about Fan and the meaning of her actions.

    I have to admit that at time I found the philosophizing bits, which read a bit like a report set down for posterity, to be a bit tedious. However, at other moments, their insightfulness and the beauty of the writing really struck me (see the quote above). [Not for nothing is this guy a professor at Princeton and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]

    Still, I preferred the parts where Fan's story was actually getting told. In many ways it stays with the conventions of the genre: a quest for an unlikely outcome, a peripatetic journey during the course of which the protagonist encounters a concatenation of strange situations illustrating the variety of circumstances that people may create for themselves 'after the fall.' Although the tune is familiar, this is among the better renditions that I've encountered.

    Fan is a strong, capable person, but she is just one (literally small) person in a large, hazardous world. I felt that the sense I got of even the most capable of us being like a leaf tossed in the wind was appropriate for the post-apocalyptic setting. Some people may not like that Fan, here, is a very opaque character. Her story is, essentially, being told to us by someone else, so we don't see her internal dialogue. But a large point of the book is about how others project their own dreams and disappointments onto Fan, how she becomes a symbol in her community. So I felt that worked as well.

    The story slowly but steadily builds in tension. It has a sense of predictability/inevitability of fate to it which became near-agonizing toward the end. I had some doubts whether I'd be happy with any of the possible ways that I guessed it might conclude. But I actually loved the ending - I thought it had just the right mixture of openness and conclusion, pessimism and hope.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ????1/2
    Rounded down to 4

    Fan is a teen diver who leaves her sheltered life living and working as a diver caring for and maintaining the large fish tanks in B-Mor, formerly Baltimore, on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Reg, who has mysteriously vanished. B-Mor is a walled city that houses workers who grow crops and cultivate fish for food for the nearby Charter Village. She sets on a quest through the counties, the now uncivilized bulk of the former US where she meets a variety of people who hinder or help her on her journey to seek both Reg and her long gone brother, Liwei, who was brilliant enough to test into the high life of a member of a Charter village before she was ever born. Fan is strong, resilient, quiet and apparently thoughtful, but the POV is a group one and we never know her deep thoughts.

    Chang-Rae Lee is by far one of the best writers I've read in months. His prose is perfect for the setting and feel of the novel, and if you like literary novels and/or post-apocalyptic ones, I recommend this. So, then, why did I round it down? The lack of quotation marks (although one could argue here, as with The Road, that there is a good reason for this, but life is not nearly has hopeless here as it was in The Road), and a few things that didn't truly seem to fit in the novel, but almost everything is a spoiler with this book, which is why I'm writing so little about it.

    The writing is wonderful, but not flowery, and the way it flows it also tells something I don't want to give away here given that it is such a new book and I think knowing virtually nothing about it was extremely helpful; there's no point in rewriting the jacket. Two quotes:

    "Fan left B-Mor for love, but perhaps not for love alone."

    then, in a later part

    "We have previously indicated that Fan had larger aims in leaving B-More, but perhaps this is not necessarily true. It may be more a matter of our own shifting perspective on that brief period, that we have come to overlay upon her journeys as we revisit them over time than anything she herself was conceiving, planning, implementing."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Moments of excellence, yet too often gets bogged down by philosophical banter.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Inventive, thoughtful book. My only problem was that I found the language a bit stilted at times. Read this book!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was absolutely hooked on this novel from the first chapter. From the unreliable narrator to the plucky, mystifying heroine, this world had me in it's grip and didn't let go. It was surprising to me that the writing was so good - I don't often include genre fiction in the same category as literary fiction. This was a fascinating blending of the two. As such, it was at times not as plot-heavy as some genre readers might want, but I found myself completely enthralled. The ending was heartbreaking and yet hopeful, with plenty of unanswered questions to keep readers thinking after the last page had been turned. Another that could definitely be on my list of favorites this year.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm having "conflictions" about this one. Parts of the story were cleverly written, a couple of the characters were well-drawn, but I just didn't get it, and I hated the ending. I don't normally do futuristic sci-fi, dystopia or futuristic looks at manufactured foods, manufactured family units, and regimented societies. This one has all of those elements and a story line that just didn't grab me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    OK, it took me quite some time to finally finish reading this book, but I did it. The author's writing style (at least for this book) was much too flowery for me and I felt it diluted the story.There are many passages and bits of information that could have been left out and it would have made no difference to the story but including them just caused unneeded detours that made me put the book down A LOT. The story (minus the fluff) was done really well. It was interesting and if it had been trimmed, it would definitely be a 4 or 5 star read.The plot takes place in the future when there are many changes in the world. There are two types of cities/towns...basically rich towns and then the working class towns. Fan, a Chinese girl working in a "working class" town as a fish farmer, decides to leave the safety of her town after her boyfriend disappears (and no one knows why). She doesn't know where she is going or why, she just wants to go. The story follows her and her adventures wandering and searching.3.5 stars
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a haunting (yet inspiring) tale of Fan, a young woman living in a difficult world trying to find the love of her life who has gone missing. He possibly offers a medical hope for a world that is falling apart.The prose is deep an wonderful to read.The story wanders a bit because of the peculiar narrative technique of the story. It's told from a third person narrating Fan's tale. That means it's incomplete, because of lapses in knowledge of what happens. That wandering is compelling and feels at times like a campfire story.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fan is a diver in B-mor, and very good at what she does. However, she leaves this prescribed community and sets off into the unknown when her boyfriend goes missing, hoping to find either him or the brother who left before she was born. Along the way she encounters kindness and also evil, danger, and crazy-ness, but she always seems to escape and help others in the process. Told at times from the point of view of a resident of B-mor who is left behind and holds Fan in awe, the questions raised throughout the narrative, and its ambiguity, keep the reader on edge--in a good way.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very slow to start. At times very grim, even for a Dystopian novel. It took me awhile to get into the flow of the story, but I did like the main character. I read this for my book discussion group. I am not sure if I would have kept going after the slow start otherwise. There is a lot to talk about so I do recommend it for groups. This is a book for lovers of language and those who enjoy literary novels.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A dystopian novel from Chang-Rae Lee was a reach for me. I generally love his writing, but this novel just didn't strike a cord with me
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Read several fantastic reviews of this book, so had to buy it. After reading it, I am not sure if I am confused, disappointed, or just plain perplexed. I certainly would not look forward to this world, where society (government?) controls your life much more than it presently does, at least in the U.S.I struggled through the first 50 pages, started to pick up speed, but then got bogged down again. Would I recommend it? If you are thrilled by dystopian novels, go ahead. If not, sorry, Mr. Lee, I have to say skip it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    What a beauty. Well, almost. This was bit of a challenging read for me - Lee's vocabulary and style was varied and precise. This made the read quite enjoyable from both aesthetic and intellectual angles.On Such a Full Sea follows the story of a girl named Fan. Fan grew up in a production-commune called "B-Mor," which served high quality fish and produce to high-end villages called "charters." In this dystopian future, it appears that national governments have collapsed to be replaced with a "Charter Association." This is the extreme version of money-is-power and touches on some of the important topics of today.While it certainly appears to romanticize the commune-like living of the production towns, Lee leaves me questioning the point here - is this a warning? a promise?After reading the book, I looked it up online and began reading some of the comments. Le Guin's commentary on the suspension-of-disbelief required in the novel is spot-on. Skeptical folks will have a hard time. Those less skeptical, like myself, will just end up confused.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I was so excited for this book, especially when my book club chose to read it. Sadly, I couldn't even finish it. There was too much explaining the world rather than establishing it through a smart exploration that laced the plot with pertinent information. What I found most frustrating was how much of what was explained didn't even directly relate to Fan or her journey, which was the only reason I wanted to keep reading but kept being denied of. On top of that, I thought the novel was overwrought. First-person plural can be prone to do this, especially when it's written with such a nostalgic, calm, "mature" tone. The prose was also clunky, due, in my opinion, to being overwrought. I hate giving up on books and there aren't many that I do give up on, but I just had to.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the first book by Chang-rae Lee that I've had the pleasure of reading and now I certainly plan on reading more! Lee has a beautiful way with words and they just flow on the page creating a literary masterpiece that compels you to pay attention and care about the matters at hand. It's not easy to write a book in first person plural but Lee does so, and does it so masterfully that it is almost unnoticeable. Citizens of B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) collectively narrate the story of a young girl named Fan who leaves the safety of the compound to search for her boyfriend Reg, who has mysteriously vanished. Fan must find her way through the treacherous open counties where food is scarce, disease rampant, and crime rages. Along the way she meets many strange characters who go out of their way to help her track down Reg, even though she isn't one of them. The counties people are no doubt jealous of her "privileged" life and the Charter people would look down on her for being lower class workers. While Fan is trying to make sense of her new surroundings, the omniscient B-Mor narrators fill is on how things have changed since Fan voluntarily left the safety of their compound. There are riots, guerrilla movements, discontent. Will it last, or will they eventually forget about Fan? Will Fan ever find Reg? Read to find out!Even though this is a dystopian that takes place centuries away in America, it is still totally relate-able to us. Lee paints a picture of the lower, middle, and upper classes and the pitfalls of each one. It's truly ingenious and a work of art. Now I know what all the hype was about!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is really a hard book to evaluate. Did I like it or dislike it? I'm on the fence. I found it funny, though, that this dystopian novel began in B-Mor, once Baltimore, my own hometown. Both Fan, an aquarium diver, and I left that city for different reasons. Fan leaves B-Mor in search of her suddenly vanished boyfriend Reg. Leaving B-Mor for Fan is no easy matter because outside are only the "countries", where the dregs of society live, and the Charters, home to only the most intelligent and wealthiest of people. B-Mor was more of an industrial complex set up to cater to the Charters. The story is told through the narration of B-Mor residents without ever knowing who the individuals are who tell this tale. Fan does not tell it herself...and that makes me crazy. It's hard to read a book that tells what others think and feel. In the story we meet individuals who represent B-Mor, the countries, and the Charters. They range from semi-normal to completely bizarre. Who is the weirdest of those individuals? I'd say that Miss Cathy, Charter caretaker of girls One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven, could certainly take the prize.I found the first two thirds of this novel slow going indeed. I really had to force myself to read through it carefully to keep my focus. The last third of the book was better because it had more interesting and believable character interaction, especially the Charter couple of Betty and Oliver, along with Vik, Oliver's friend.The best part of this novel, though, was the ending. The last three pages blew me away! However, it took so long to get there. Nevertheless, without buildup of the rest of the story, the big bang of the ending (which I'm not sure I completely understood anyway) would have lost its power. The most I can say about this novel is that it's vastly different from the author's first two books (A Gesture Life, Native Speaker) which I adored. For me, this novel was hard work..
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thought this was a strange but wonderful novel. Sure, the "we" narration can seem clumsy, and the style is not propulsive but rather discursive. The heroine's journey does meander, as does the narration, and there are times you wish there were fewer stops along the way. But the long windup pays off, I think, in the end.If you've read both, it's hard not to compare this to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Both are good; I preferred this one.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Class, commerce, community in what I think is a speculative fiction format. A teenager named Reg goes missing from the sheltered, gated existence of his city and his girlfriend Fan goes looking for him, thus allowing the reader to see this much different world... what seems like an apocalyptic wasteland in some areas and in others, even better off than we are now. Somehow everyone has evacuated American cities, but the"originals" (immigrants from countries that have been environmentally destroyed) take over to rebuild. The cities are now the "facilities" that essentially farm fish and vegetables for the higher class Charters. There is a fine line between having enough money (and following the rules) to live in the Charters ... if not, you go straight to the counties, where it is almost impossible to survive. Top to bottom! So it seems the best place to live is the "middle class", the facilities, but you have to be born into it. At times, I got a little impatient waiting to see how the world had become what it is in this book. I couldn't tell if there was some sort of apocalypse type situation, and this was the world rebuilt, since at times, the world seems much as it does now, just slightly askew. There are underground malls, parks with fish ponds, bubble tea shops, global atmosphere travel! This world can't be too bad... so another explanation is that the book is just a future America. But I would have loved a simple back story, maybe a short preface, to make if possible for me to delve into the story better. Why would the people in the cities evacuate, if the counties were so miserable and they can't go to the Charters? Even an estimated year would have been enough for me. I couldn't seem to get past trying to figure out how this happened. The book is narrated by "we", the residents of B-mor but the main character, Fan, is the caretaker of a few tanks of fish that are raised as food before she starts her journey. I couldn't help but imagine the amazing Baltimore aquarium (well, the only aquarium I'm visited anyway) being repurposed to grow America's food supply. It seemed like terrible things kept happening to Fan, maybe just to make her more sympathetic. On her own, Fan seems distant and unknowable (though that is probably her personality) which doesn't help the reminder that this America's history is unknowable. Maybe hearing Fan's stories from her perspective but also hearing B-mor's interpretation would have been better. It's possible this one is over my head but it would certainly be an interesting one to discuss. I just know there are many interpretations and meanings that I'm missing. This book isn't the reason, but I think speculative fiction is getting a bit too real for me these days, as I recently heard about human organ 3D printing (like the special first ever 3D cover this book happens to have) and that by 2100 there will be 28 billion people in the world. I don't think 28 billion people was the reason for this book's world! I don't think writers can even fathom that yet.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fan is a resident of B-Mor, a once-thriving American city which has become a walled-in food-production facility-- a community of contented middle-class workers-- supplying fish and vegetables to the wealthy and elite Charter communities that lay nestled inside their own walls, behind their own layers of security. In between these walled villages is the Counties-- a wild, loosely structured no-man's-land, where one might find their fortune or become lost to brutal lawlessness or starvation. Fan is happy enough in B-Mor, working as a tank diver alongside her boyfriend Reg, who works the carefully cultivated vegetable plots. They have large families, plenty of food, freedom to play soccer and shop for music and watch movies and take up hobbies. Nothing more could be wanted! But when Reg suddenly disappears, Fan decides, illogically, to leave the safety of B-Mor, to go into the Counties in search of him. Leaving her family and her life behind, with no plan and no supplies, she sets out on foot alone.The narrator is an unnamed, unknown resident of B-Mor, passing down the Legend Of Reg & Fan to a younger generation. The narrator recounts what is known of Fan's journey and travails, almost impassively, with the gravity of one who already knows the outcome but doesn't want to spoil the tale. It is the narrator who inserts keen observations and timely philosophical questions, leading the listener (or reader) to contemplate, but letting them reach their own conclusions. There are times that these "insightful" moments become bogged down or fly off on a tangent, but eventually they lead you back around to the story at hand.Fan's journey is fraught with dangers-- many quite horrific and disturbing, some merely unsettling. And just when you think you know what's going to happen, there will be a twist that hits you in the gut or makes you cringe or gives you nightmares. But this isn't a scary book. Ultimately, it's a look at class warfare and a commentary on the inevitability of social structure. There are no great social or political insights given (that is left to the individual reader), but there are a great many ideas put forward to ruminate on. I enjoyed the book immensely, but the ending could have used a little more... oomph. Still highly recommended for fans of a more intellectual or mature dystopian story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The language in this book is beautiful, without question, but the story has a very slow start. I had difficulty getting fully engaged from the beginning, and once I was into the book I felt that I was already too far removed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The setting is 100 years in our future and society has been divided into 3 classes; the wealthy and educated Charters, the people who make their living by serving the Charters, either directly, or in safe walled communities, and finally the unlucky few who live in the open ungoverned spaces. Fan is a member of the serving class who lives in the community of B'Mor (formerly Baltimore). Her community raise prized fish that are grown in sterile environments to provide the Charters with a delicious food source free from carcinogens. But one day, her boyfriend Reg goes missing and Fan begins her hero's journey, searching for him,The real gem behind many dystopian novels is their commentary about today's society. And there were a lot of very thoughtful provocative comments. Lee's futuristic society has almost no upward mobility. The people who make their living serving the Charters can only get the opportunity to move into the Charter class by excelling at a test. But, they don't have the benefit of the education, tutors, and enrichment that Charter kids get. Sound familiar? There is an obsession among the charters of being C-free (cancer) and people are tested constantly so they can catch the disease when it is as small as possible. Even babies who are asymptomatic are treated as soon as any sign is detected. Of course the early detection is an advancement over where we are today. Unfortunately, the side effects remain.The writing for this story is beautiful and the issues raised are thought provoking. But I felt the ending was abrupt. It was unexpected and unsatisfying for me. But overall an enjoyable book. Looking forward to reading some of his past works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really wanted to love this book. Literary speculative fiction, preferably with dystopian elements, is one of my favorite things to read, and Lee's writing style is unique. Not only is his writing quite nice, but the narrator is a pretty interesting collective family or community voice rather than a single first- or third-person narrator. I also enjoyed finding the parallels between Lee's future societies and current trends in our own.But...it took a while to get into the plot, and I think I only became engrossed because I was stuck on airplanes for several hours with just reading to do. Though the storyline did remain interesting, the book seemed really slow. I never caught on to what point(s) the author was trying to convey - the story seemed like it was trying to give some kind of message, but I struggled unsuccessfully for the full novel with figuring out what that message was. And while I liked the sudden twist at the conclusion, I didn't like how one of the main issues driving the entire plot was left open. I was hoping this would be a super read, but it failed to live up entirely to my expectations.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Lee's book failed to engage this reader; but I sincerely doubt it even tried. The book simply seemed to exist, basking in weathered dystopian tomes, with little to no plot and languid character development. Naturally, I had to give up reading about 50 pages in--it was just too painfully confusing and boring.