Slow River (1995)

Deserves every accolade that has been heaped upon it. Slow River is gorgeous and compelling; I was fascinated by the world and the viewpoint character within a dozen pages. Griffith handles her three-to-four storylines really well; you can always tell which one is going on within a sentence or two in each section, which is something this is really hard and which drives me crazy.

I am not sure how I feel about the abuse or dubcon subplots (I definitely would've appreciated some warning about them before starting the book), but they're handled about as well as I could reasonably expect (which is to say: better than pretty much any commercially-published book I've read in a long, long while — compared to [b:Deerskin|8087|Deerskin|Robin McKinley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165652591s/8087.jpg|2321293], this is Scarleteen, and I mean that as a compliment). The infodumps about water filtration are just barely endurable because (a) I love characters who are competent and Lore pushes that button and (b) there's a moment when Griffith pretty much admits, "I know, you don't give a shit and you've been skimming all of this. It's okay."

Also: so many lesbians. Everyone is a lesbian! It is awesome. ( )

Liked it a great deal: gripping, hard to put down. The flipping back and forth in narrative time worked well. I also liked the fact that the main character was uncomplicatedly gay; it was done as something normal enough not to need commenting on, as was the case with her uncle who was in a gay marriage.

As sometimes can be the case, the protagonist was a bit too all-round capable and competent for strict reality, but it was backed up well with the plot and character development, and all loose knots were satisfactorily tied. Will look out for more by this author. ( )

Re-read.

Griffith is masterful at world-building. Her characters are all too real and her narratives sing. This is a multifaceted and delicately nuanced story that is a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit old-school SF, a little bit suspense- but mostly it's an exercise in diving deep and coming up changed. ( )

This was hard to get into, but picked up considerably in the second half. Part of the difficulty was that the book is written as a set of parallel stories covering different parts of the timeline, and none of them have much impact until you know enough about the others to have some context. Once the pieces begin to fall into place, the story becomes clearer and all the character development is sort of revealed all at once.

I didn't dislike it. There are some interesting things going on here, and I think it's a stronger artistic effort than Ammonite. But it's a grim story without many bright spots, and I just don't have much stomach for stories that focus on rape, abuse, and involuntary prostitution for the bulk of their emotional impact. The actual science fiction parts implied what I think would have been a much more interesting story with more global implications - instead, we have incest and the perfect date-rape drug.

I wouldn't recommend against it, certainly - it's a well-crafted novel. But it just made me tired. ( )

I think I may have liked this book slightly more than it actually deserved. Not that it doesn't deserve to be liked, its solid, intelligently written science fiction with believable characters and an interesting plot, expressed in some fairly elegant prose.

There are some pacing issues though. I ran into this with Ammonite too, its like somewhere around the last couple of chapters she just ran out of time or incentive, and wrapped everything up a little bit too quickly and easily. I'm a little bemused as well by how very interesting I found the whole sewage plant management portion of the story. Seems like that should have been less engaging than it was. I'm still uncertain whether the twist near the end was supposed to be a surprise to anyone but the protagonist, it certainly wasn't any kind of surprise to me. Intellectually I see that there are some things here that seems like should have bothered me more than they did.

The fact is however, I just had FUN reading this. I would set it down to go do something, and in the back of my head was a little warm feeling because I knew that when I got done I had reading pleasure waiting for me. I would pick it up again and be absorbed within a page or two and just happily trundling along like a kid making mud pies and singing a little song. Sometimes an author's voice speaks to you enough like the voice in your own head that you just feel comfortable and interested, flaws or not. ( )