Hummingbird Salamander

Thank you to Net Galley; Mr VanderMeer; and Firar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC of this book for an honest review.

I love VanderMeer. Really, I do. I gobbled up the Southern Reach trilogy; I bawled over Borne. I have his amazing book on writing. So I fully expected to love this book with every fiber of my being. Yet, I did not.
Essentially, we follow “Jane,” our statuesque, muscular heroine as she goes down the rabbit hole of eco-conspiracy theories. One day, as she's leaving a coffee shop, the barista runs after her with a mysterious note. This note leads her to a taxidermied, extinct hummingbird. And after that, things get really real. She's followed, she's threatened, she's armed. Her life gets topsy-turvy and out of her control completely. And all because of a dead bird. And maybe a salamander, if she can find it.

The focus of her quest is one Silvina Vilcapampa, supposed eco-terrorist and daughter of an evil industrialist who traffics in rare animals. Silvina is supposedly dead when the story starts, but so many things don't add up for Jane. As she hunts down anyone connected to Silvina and the bird, she is further embroiled in a strange conspiracy that has ties to her childhood. And nothing, including what she thought of Silvina, is reliable.

I went into this book so excited for everything in it. But the writing was not up to the standard to which I'm accustomed with Vandermeer. He constructs beautiful sentences into weird, lovely, tragic tales. This had very little of that. It felt like he dialed it in, or rushed to meet a deadline. Jane is never as engaging as Ghost Bird or Borne or Rachel or the Psychologist, or even Control. She's a mess of a person, which is fine. But she just lacks that extra something. And the things that happen don't entirely make sense. I've read two books in which heroes hide in piles of slain animal grue in the last few weeks, and this one just didn't feel as realistically horrifying as the other one (in My Heart is a Chainsaw). Jane engenders a disconnect from the reader. It isn't a case of likeable or unlikeable. It's a case of, “I don't really care about her.”

I kept waiting to love this book, and I kept being disappointed. It felt like a thriller, but weirder. But not as charmingly Weird as Vandermeer's other books. And, at times, it was almost nonsensical, but not in the giant bear fights sentient alien plant way, which is the very best way.

And then the end, Which I realize some people didn't like. But, for me, it kept the book at three stars. The end isn't satisfying; it doesn't need to be. It needs to have impact, which it did. Nothing is what Jane expected, nor what I expected. And the not knowing is tragic and hopeful and beautiful.