Posted by This title popped up on one of my recommendation threads and I saw that the author had read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake as part of his research. Readers, I fucking love Entangled Life. It’s a non fiction book about fungus that can change the way you look at the world. It was enough for me to bump the book on my TBR from “I’ll read it at some point” to “I’m reading this next.”
The book opens with the line, “No good day ever started with death before coffee.” I appreciated the tonal hook. Our MC, Henrietta, is a broken cop. She’s looked down upon, she’s been assigned to a city she doesn’t want to be in, and she’s a fairly miserable person.
Usually when a book is written in a single POV I need to like the character or I can get overwhelmed by negative feelings and eventually DNF if I’m hating the main character. If there’s a second POV who isn’t a pile of dicks, someone I can really root for, then that counterbalances the dickhead POV and I can enjoy myself just fine. There are some books where that’s not the case and it’s usually because of a redemption arc. I am a sucker for redemption arcs. They are just so satisfying when done well. I can enjoy a reverse redemption arc as well. I find some of the most fascinating character work has been done by Joe Abercrombie who sometimes writes characters that are morally fluid. Some of his characters will go from being terrible people at the start, then they start to show morals and values and change into a “good person”, only to roll all the way back down the hill and end up where they started, or worse. She was so unpleasant to read about at the start that I was curious to know if she stayed that way or was going to change as a person. So, I kept reading.
This is a post-war world with two sentient species, humans and the fungal people, who are trying to live together… except the humans are not making this easy. A stepped on society will always rebel. You can’t conquer a people and treat them like trash and then expect them to just take it indefinitely. But, we humans almost always give that route a try before regretting it later.
A dead child washes on shore and it’s Henrietta’s job to find out what happened. It’s not a human child, though. Someone has mutilated a young fungal child, and they aren’t the first or last dead child to show up. Our MC is deeply, deeply racist. Not just a little racist, like an offhand comment or two. No, I’d say irrationally hateful, off-the-deep-end racist is an accurate way of putting it. Her inner monologue is riddled with slurs against the mushroom people, and she has so many of them. There are so many different racial slurs in her vernacular, and she uses them frequently. She doesn’t just keep them to herself, either. She needles and berates the only fungal detective on the police force, demanding to know why he would join the force and calling him slurs to his face. Despite her hatred for the fungal people, she still feels genuinely compelled to find the killer of the fungal kid. It’s a brutal murder, it’s beyond words (although the author does describe it) and she doesn’t want that happening to a child — “even a fungal child.” This sends her down a rabbit hole of the fungal people’s society, culture, and suffering. It’s a surreal landscape and she’s utterly uncomfortable with it. I enjoyed her being uncomfortable.
There is a lot to enjoy about this world building. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before and I’ve read quite a few books. I’ve always wanted something that was heavily based around fungus and mushrooms. However, there was a little bit of heavy-handedness with certain words and descriptors, to the point where it became grating. The world mycelium was used around 150 times, mushroom was used 208 times, other words tied to mushrooms like fungi, fruiting body, spongey etc. were also used quite a bit and it just became a little too much for me. Sometimes less is more. If the room had been described as “made of mycelium” and left at that, rather than having the character push through the mycelium door after crossing the mycelium floor after putting his glass down on the mycelium table, it wouldn’t have been as overwhelming — if you get what I mean. I’m also hypersensitive to word overuse, so take that as you will.
I was kind of confused about the biology of the mushroom people. I know this is fantasy and it’s not real life, but because this also felt a bit sciencey I couldn’t help myself but wonder about the why of it all. An example: the fungi people would often release spores seemingly as an emotional response but in the real world spores are there for reproduction. (Fungi reproduction tends to be asexual, but the fungi people had men and women in the same way we do. I honestly would have expected a race of genderless persons, but that’s really neither here nor there). What I was most curious about is how do they actually reproduce if it’s not through spores because there’s also mention of rape regarding the fungi women during the war that resulted in “hybrid children.” Henrietta even thought to herself this was strange because she doesn’t know how it was possible due to biological reasons. It’s possible I missed something that explains all that, but those kinds of things threw me for a loop.
So, for me, the redemption arc for Henrietta went a little too fast. She gets a new partner on the force, he’s a fungi person, and through meeting him and his people she realizes that her people are wrong in how they treat his people. This is a fairly common story both in fiction and the real world, but this change of heart starts happening in a single day’s experience with her new partner. She’s in her 40’s I believe, and she’s had these feelings and beliefs for a long time. They are hardwired into her base personality. At the start of the day she thinks to herself about how she wants all the fungal people dead, but by the end of the day she was self reflecting about how differently she’s starting to feel them.
The pacing here was great, I started and finished this very quickly once I actually had the time to devote to reading. It’s tightly written and develops the plot, characters, and world building at an even pace which is something I always appreciate.
I am pretty passionate about the themes and world building aspects of this book, so I sat there and hyper-fixated on things that other readers likely wouldn’t. Overall, this was a really neat book and I’m glad I took the time to read it. I’m certainly not forgetting it any time soon. I also think I’ll continue on with the series to see where it’s going. A lot of these complaints are fairly small potatoes in the big scheme of things, and I’m interested in where this story is going.