Future Home of the Living God

Well that was a waste of time. This book spends its entire length asking one real question. Will the main character's baby survive? There are a number of smaller questions - Will the baby be born normal? Why is evolution turning backwards, or sideways? What happened to the main character's father? What happened to her friend from the hospital? What happened to her husband? Does she ever find freedom?

THE BOOK ANSWERS NONE OF THESE QUESTIONS.

I am really frustrated with this book. Why did I bother reading it if it refuses to resolve any of its plotlines?

We're going to get a little bit into writing theory here. It has been a classic recommendation to have the climax of your book 2/3 of the way through the book, and have the last third be denouement. Wrap-up. Show us how the climax affected the characters and the world. John Green does this well - all his books follow a standard plot line. Character A is introduced. A meets B. B changes A's life. B leaves A's life. (Those last two are usually incorporated in the climax of the book.) A has to learn how to live without B in a world changed by B's existence in it. It's a little formulaic, but it works for Green, and his books are great. Some books do not do this so well. Wheel of Time had 5-6 pages of denouement after the series climax, and nothing was really revealed about how the events changed the world for the better. Future Home of the Living God had TWO. TWO PAGES AFTER THE CLIMAX. AND THEY ANSWER NOTHING. The main character talks about missing winter.

I finished the book and almost threw it across the room. I probably would have, except for two things: I was at a friend's house, and it was a library book. That's all that saved it from that fate. I have stacks of books I want to read, and I feel like I just wasted a few hours on this piece of crap.

The writing was actually pretty good, and the main character is an Ojibwe Indian, so there's minority representation, but the book as a whole was just CRAP. Wrap up your plotlines. Answer the questions you ask. (At least the ones having to do with your plot - you can leave unanswered philosophical questions, that's fine.)

Hard pass on this book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

2 stars for “it was just okay.” This book left me with more questions than answers. I think I prefer Erdrich's literary fiction, and this felt opportunistic in trying to capitalize on the boom for speculative fiction around women's rights and women's bodies.

stranger things could happen.

To close to Handmaid's Tale? Maybe, but I think the idea at the centre of Handmaid's Tale can handle more than one author's approach. And, most importantly (to me) it kept me completely engaged through 2, almost back-to-back, plane rides.

The evo-bio stuff was interesting, although I was unclear how her heritage fit into the pregnancy (and the resulting child) – I suspect that was left deliberately vague, but I couldn't quite sort out Erdrich's perspective on biology/evolution and culture that would be interesting to trace through the book.

Lots of stuff on writing and creating that kind of floats through that book without really connecting to the main narrative.

This novel fits right into the wheelhouse of stories that I like - our recognizable universe, but with an interesting (and not necessarily explained twist). In this case, it's the mysterious way that evolution begins to run backwards. I'm okay that the “why” of this not explained in the course of the plot, but I would have liked more description of the “how” as this is only alluded to in a few places.

I found the narrator an interesting one, yet would have liked more development of one of the not insignificant aspects of her character - she's a convert to Roman Catholicism. While this is evidenced in her reverence for saints, particularly the Native American Kateri Tekawitha, I would have liked to see more connections made. At the heart of my practice of the Catholic faith is a reverence for how God is present in the physicality of creation. There is speculation by the narrator that perhaps the God behind the drive of evolution has withdrawn from creation and this why everything is devolving. This is an interesting thought and I would have liked more of this religious/scientific/cosmological speculation woven throughout the plot.

I usually love anything by Louise Erdrich, but I struggled with this one. It was like three separate stories that wouldn't come together (a dystopian novel about the harm we are doing to the earth; a second about the way we treat women's bodies; and third a story about the poor way Native American's have been treated and how they will possibly not only survive but thrive because of what we have done to the environment). Strangely, even though I didn't really care for it I wanted to know more at the end. Too much was left unsaid. And characters just disappeared without a second glance, which didn't seem to affect anyone greatly. It is appropriate for our time and I could see where she was going with a lot of her ideas, but I didn't think that it held together.

The main character was interesting, but never really fully developed.

The plot/situation wasn't explained beyond bits and pieces which was frustrating.

Overall, it was a quick read, wanting to find out what happened to Cedar, but as the book continued it left me feeling hopeless.

Not a book to read if you want a happy ending.

Great story more in the 1984 mode rather than recent sci-fi/dystopia novel mode.

This is harrowing. It makes Handmaid's Tale seem cheerful. Plus, it abruptly ends without providing any closure, let alone redemption. I'm still working out how I feel about it... aside from my own complicated feelings about pregnancy and motherhood.

It was well-written. There were things about it I liked. It's... profoundly unsettling, but it means to be.

The science is a little “wait, what?” and there is some weird magical stuff that happens early in the book that never goes anywhere, which I found disappointing. A few scenes are so horrifying or tense that I felt my heartrate spiking. But, I was reading it on a plane, so it served the purpose of distracting me quite well!