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Emma Geen

Författare till The Many Selves of Katherine North

1 verk 81 medlemmar 6 recensioner

Verk av Emma Geen

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Födelsedag
c1988
Kön
female
Nationalitet
UK
Utbildning
University of Bath

Medlemmar

Recensioner


The premise of this book, teenage children working as "phenomenauts", researching the reality of being a fox or a whale, or an eagle, by projecting their consciousness into constructed versions of the creatures and experiencing their lives in the wild, is so original, that it took me a long time to see that the book is really about a strong but damaged teenager who is, literally, trying to find herself.

At nineteen, with seven years of working for ShenCorp, jumping into the minds and senses of other creatures behind her, Kit North is the world's most experienced phenomenaut.  She loves what she does. She needs to do it. It is fundamental to her sense of who she is.

Kit does not love ShenCorp and what they want to do with her abilities, The book opens with Kit hiding from ShenCorp in the streets and parks of Bristol, hungry, cold and alone. Most of the rest of the novel is spent flipping between that timeline and the events that led up to it.  This structure misled me into thinking that the book is a thriller, but it isn't really, it's a personal journey into memory and identity being made by a vulnerable girl at the edge of her ability to hold herself together.

There was a lot to like about this book. The plot is original and well thought through. The descriptions of Kit's experience of being different animals, perceiving the world through their senses, being driven by their urges, having the joy of their ability to fly or swim or sing or hunt, are beautifully done.

The description of the difficulty of "coming home",  of being just human with all those memories of being yourself in other bodies, is subtle and effective.

The novel captures the corrosive anxiety of not knowing if you can depend on your own perceptions, of being unable to be certain of whether you're paranoid or whether you're being hunted, of whether your sense of self is fractured or simply expanded beyond most people's experience.

There are things in the novel that didn't work well for me. The ShenCorp bad guys are thinly drawn and unremittingly bad without any real explanation of why they behave that way.  The pace could have been tighter, especially if I read this with the expectation of it being a thriller. Sometimes the same facility for complex description that made the animal experiences vivid, clogged up the scenes that were there just to move the plot along.

The ending was well done if this is a book about a personal journey but a little anti-climatic if it's meant as a thriller.

This was an enjoyable read with an original premise but it got a little caught between thriller and personal journey, or, at least, my reading got stuck on that.
… (mer)
1 rösta
Flaggad
MikeFinnFiction | 5 andra recensioner | Jul 16, 2020 |
I loved the sections where the protagonist lived life through animal senses - very vivid and expressive - however the story that wrapped round these luminous interludes was fairly lame. If the author had thought through the science and tech implications more rigorously it could have been a very good book, as it is the idea of building live animal bodies from the size of a spider to a whale in a lab then shipping them around the world into their "natural" habitats for research into wild behaviour is totally implausible as written. The rest of the story is just standard EvilCorp machinations.… (mer)
½
1 rösta
Flaggad
SChant | 5 andra recensioner | Apr 27, 2017 |
In the mid-21st century, scientific research has opened up new possibilities for the study of zoology. The discipline of phenomenautism allows a human consciousness to be projected into a lab-grown animal body, which is then released into the wild. Social hierarchies, communication and the functioning of the ecosystem can be monitored in this way. ShenCorp is a leader in its field, based at the University of Bristol and producing a greater quantity of research than any of its competitors. It differs in one other important way as well. Rival companies use adult phenomenauts, who are less adaptable and suffer harsher side-effects during and after ‘jumps’; but ShenCorp uses teenagers, sometimes as young as twelve, whose plasticity allows them greater flexibility and to more easily inhabit the skins of different creatures...

For the rest of the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/01/07/the-many-selves-of-katherine-north-emma-geen...
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
TheIdleWoman | 5 andra recensioner | Jan 7, 2017 |

Listor

Statistik

Verk
1
Medlemmar
81
Popularitet
#222,754
Betyg
½ 3.3
Recensioner
6
ISBN
14

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