Marlee Jane Ward

I enjoyed Welcome to Orphancorp so much and when I discovered this sequel I was super excited and read it in one sitting and I would like the next eleventy books in this series/setting immediately now and thank you.

What I love about it is that the world that's been built, with its own details and quirks of language and everything, is so easy to get absorbed in. It's not like some spec fic worlds where one needs a glossary for unfamiliar words, because they're so easy to pick up from context.

I also love the queerness about it, not only Mirii's quest to find Vu but all the background references and how casually they're dropped in and how it's not a big deal. Tat's singular they pronouns make me happier than I can express.… (more)

Psynode (2017) is the follow-up to the award-winning Welcome to Orphancorp, (2015) by Melbourne author Marlee Jane Ward, (reviewed here). That the title of the final of this 'technopunk thriller' trilogy is Prisoncorp (2019) bodes ill for the central character Mirii, who had in Book one, escaped from dehumanising slavery in a brutal system designed to achieve compliant child workers, and now in Book Two is on a quest to rescue her friend Vu. This is a very dark dystopian YA series, with uncanny resonances in the modern world.

Psynode has been calling to me ever since I started gathering together my pile of (nearly all Australian) novellas for Novellas in November hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. (An Island by Karen Jennings sneaked in there because it was longlisted for the Booker and had just arrived from Benn's Books. Some of my books are not very good at waiting their turn.) Psynode was in my novellas pile because it's only 177 pages long. It's quick to read; I romped through it in a couple of hours this morning.

It was written only four years ago, before the explosion of Covid-induced online shopping. As I read Mirii's brutal initiation into work as a warehouse picker for Allnode, I found myself thinking of what I've read about work conditions in Amazon warehouses, and wondering about the experiences of the Woolworths packers who've been bringing me my groceries in Lockdown. Mirii has demanding targets to reach, and what she soon discovers is that while the penalty for failing too many targets is instant dismissal, achieving them only reduces the time she's allowed to achieve them. It's a horrible work environment...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/19/psynode-orphancorp-2-by-marlee-jane-ward/… (more)

A brutal slice of through-the-cracks childhood in a dystopic Australian future. I had emotional difficulty with this orphange-as-industry setting - it's too real, too harsh, and though it's centred on the older kids, it shows in passing the infants, and every single time it screwed my stomach into knots. (Probably doesn't help that my bub is sick right now.) For the first twenty pages or so, it was touch-and-go, but by then the strong, sardonic, starkly descriptive - and incredibly Australian - first-person narrator voice had me hooked.

So basically, this is horrible, with a dash of hope, and it's so well delivered.… (more)