Uneasy with Jill’s ambition and expectations, Beckett’s alarmed by his father’s warning that Centauri III has a secret agenda, one that Jill may share. His growing chemistry with Samara angers Jill, the bright, blonde, white daughter of an archaeologist. Beckett, multiracial (Chinese/Latinx) son of two anthropologists, is intrigued by Samara, who talks them into returning to New Canaan with her. There, she runs into Beckett and Jill, two Americans from Earth’s spaceship Centauri III, its mission to learn the fate of predecessor missions. Tortured by horrific memories, she escapes to find Canaan’s ruins and to Forget. Secretly helping Outsiders, Samara may have unintentionally endangered them. For those like black-haired, brown-skinned Samara who are unable to “cache,” or repress traumatic memories, suicide is common. The Knowing have perfect memory to recall is to re-experience events as if for the first time. New Canaan’s rulers, the Knowing, live underground and are served by Outsiders, impoverished surface dwellers. Nearly 400 years after the events in The Forgetting (2016), Canaan, long abandoned, its whereabouts lost, has devolved into an evil myth, while New Canaan, the rigid, class-stratified community that’s replaced it, faces growing threats, internal and external. It’s imaginative enough, but it lacks the convincing philosophical worldbuilding essential to successful fantasy. Among other lapses, the first two chapters seem to be two separate beginnings. Continuity, however, is a recurring problem. Levy shines brightest in her potent descriptions of settings and her imaginative scenes.
#INTO THE WILDERNESS BOOK REVIEW FULL#
Although Hadara is a delightfully pert narrator, the story’s foremost tension-her subversive doubt of Nihil’s tenets-fails to reach its full potential because the religious concepts are not convincingly clear enough to weave themselves inextricably into the story. When an object falls from the sky into the marsh, Azwans (mages of Nihil) and their oversized Feroxi guards arrive to investigate, complicating things for Hadara and her family, not least because Hadara begins to have feelings for one of the guards. Since Hadara and her mother continue the passed-down-in-the-female-line family business of concocting healing potions from plants, the two are regarded with suspicion even as their services are sought out by townspeople. Living in Port Sapphire, on the island of New Meridian in the world of Kuldor, almost-16-year-old Hadara chafes under the tenets of a religion headed by the god Nihil that teaches that magic is superior to anything in nature.
#INTO THE WILDERNESS BOOK REVIEW SERIES#
Though the focus too often shifts from Maryam’s quest to differentiating good white people from bad, ultimately this dystopia will please fans of the genre and leave them awaiting Maryam’s trilogy-ending heroicsĪ fantasy series opener pits adolescent angst against an all-powerful religion. The new villainies Maryam encounters make more sense than her origin story-a modern indigenous population too-easily tricked by white missionaries-and make for a more thought-provoking dystopia. After the mystical colonialist violence of the Holy City, the dangers of the Confederated Territory for Christian Territorials (where unsubtle, occasionally explicit comparisons to present-day troubles abound) cast an unforgiving lens on the modern world. In a land once known as Australia, they encounter violence, apathy, cruelty and foulmouthed racism oozing filth across every conversation.
They’ll need to work together to survive the surprises that await outside the Holy City’s long isolation. They’re a mismatched set: “two brown Blessed Sisters, two white Apostles,” plague-stricken Joseph, believer Ruth, skeptical Maryam and Lazarus, whom Maryam had witnessed attempting rape in the first book ( The Crossing, 2013). Now Ruth, Joseph and Lazarus must fight to survive as they sail though a potentially depopulated Pacific. It was only sensible to flee the Holy City, where the white rulers were draining the blood of Maryam’s people to save their own lives. Volume 2 of any post-apocalyptic series is the epic journey from frying pan to fire, and Maryam’s harrowing adventure delivers.