Reviews and Comments

The Tufa series probably isn't for everyone, but I seem to be the target audience. I know this part of Tennessee well, and like the rest of the series, this book is filled with just absolutely delightful in-joke moments and cultural references of all sorts. There aren't many books where I find myself singing an old spiritual out loud as I read a scene. While I've found the entire series to be just plain fun, I had a harder time staying absorbed in this one in a few places. These are moments when it seems like the main character is about to get carried away by his urban cultural blinders to an obnoxious extreme. However, each time, the author has the character's basic decency save him from his cultural ignorance. The important thing isn't that Alex Bledsoe has written a fish-out-of-water character. It's that he's written a fish-out-of-water character who still makes connections despite cultural difference that are extreme. Each time I had a moment where I just felt like groaning, the author would serve up a moment of sheer cultural delight to keep me hooked, much like the rest of the Tufa series. I wonder if someone dared the author to write this one (no way you can write a Broadway musical in to the Tufa series!), and if so, he's made it work, and made it fun.

I started reading this book around lunchtime. I finished late the same night. I could hardly put it down. I found the writing style original and clear, without being devoid of description. I think the author has achieved one of the finest examples of a true introvert ever written. If you were a child who could sit and watch ants or frogs for hours, and found it easier than groups of humans, you will relate to the narrator. Some people have complained about the lack of pat answers, and the potentially unreliable narrator, but I think that the author handled both of these things very well.

The book does leave you wondering. Is this some alien infestation? Is this Mother Earth's ultimate center of recycling, come to recycle us all as a failed iteration that has screwed up too much? Is this some government experiment of crazy drugs or VR technologies, run amuck, beyond the pale, for who knows what ends? Some sorcerer whose spell got away from him? I think the purpose of the book is to make you wonder, and it does this very well. It could take any of these directions, and it takes none of them. If you want pat answers, then this book isn't for you. If you like to wonder, it may be.

There are horror elements, because bad things happen to some characters; sometimes of their own doing, because they can't cope (like someone on a bad trip); sometimes because they fall prey to the environment. However, this is not a simple slasher/monster book. In a way, I see a major theme of this book as the ability to become one with an ecosystem being the ultimate survival tool. That's the Biologist's special skill, the ability to become so absorbed by observation that she blends. Instead of immediate panic, she observes, and then she blends. The ultimate observer may be the ultimate survivor. She is also an introvert who does not freak out purely on the basis of being alone. This combination of personality traits serves her better in Area X than her peers' personality traits serve them.

I truly enjoyed this book. I'm heading straight for the sequel. I hope it is as enjoyable.