An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon is a futuristic sci-fi novel taking place on a generational spaceship called the Matilda. The ship and its society are structured in a way that the upper decks and ruling class are predominantly, if not all, white whereas the lower decks are populated with the black and brown people kept in poverty, squalor, poorly educated, and highly policed. If this isn’t a mirror to our society in the US I don’t know what is.
Aster, a neuroatypical gender fluid person living in a ship that loves binaries, is our main character and vehicle for seeing the world in which she lives (she more often than not uses her/she). Orphaned as an infant, she has taught herself medicine from her mother’s writings and has become somewhat of a traveling doctor reminiscent of times past. Aster’s skills in medicine allow her to move around on the Matilda much more so than anyone else from her social and racial class, and through this we get a glimpse into the stratified life on this ship; how each deck has its own dialect and flavor, and also how by keeping the lower classes separate from each other, the white minority has been able to maintain de-facto control over everyone.
To quote Amal El-Mohtar in her review:
This book is not an allegory for life on plantations: it’s a transposition, and through it an interrogation, an investigation, of the falsehoods and broken memories of a nightmare past. It drags up pervasive stereotypes of happy mammies and consenting love between slaver and enslaved and vivisects them, the dextrous voices of characters like Aint Melusine and Giselle deployed like scalpels to part the inflamed skin of bad history.
If I had to give one complaint about the book, it would be the ending which felt rushed to me. But maybe that is in keeping with the themes of the book. Not everything or everyone gets a satisfactory storybook ending. Sometimes things just happen in unexpected ways.
This is not an easy read due to the nature of its content, but I would call it a must read for anyone who is looking for a well-constructed world, with real lessons to be learned by an author who has supreme command of the written word.
Rating: 8/10