I liked parts of this book - the centering on water & transformation of waste, the multiple points of view and story lines, queer characters. I hated her graphic descriptions of sexual assault and the author's note at the end felt dismissive of and distancing of survivors. I wanted to like this book so much more.

“Kittens should be round.”

CW for child sexual abuse.

So What’s It About?

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be…

What I Thought

When I say that this book is unique, I don’t mean it in that condescending critical-but-not-critical way that people often mean it. I do truly think it’s genuinely unique! Three narratives from the main character Lore’s life interweave to create a story about broken families, broken partnerships, and, finally, healing. I think the book’s ultimate message is the quote I chose to start my review with: “kittens should be round.” It means that children should be cherished and nurtured rather than abused or used as pawns in their parents’ fights or trained to be miniature adults without experiencing the things that make childhood special. I really appreciate Lore’s journey of working towards this realization, during which she gardens, takes care of a cat, carves out an independent life for herself and slowly makes friends. She gradually becomes her own person after so long spent caught up in her family’s business, privilege and secrets, the pain and fear of her kidnapping and her toxic relationship with Spanner.

Spanner is definitely an interesting character - she’s magnetic and hurt and volatile and cruel, brilliant and full of a self-loathing and cynicism that keep her trapped in a life of crime. She also works as a sex worker using an aphrodisiacal drug and lies to Lore about the reasons why she has them keep doing this work. I wonder if she was intentionally written to be bipolar, but there were definitely scenes where it seemed like she was struggling with the highs of mania and the lows of depression that are familiar to me due to family diagnoses.

I mentioned child abuse previously, and while I generally think the book has some good things to say about this topic, it’s somewhat disheartening that the villain who orchestrated Lore’s kidnapping and is more or less responsible for everything bad happening at her family’s company is revealed to be her sister Greta, who was sexually abused by their mother as a child. The reason she did all that bad stuff? The CSA “made her crazy.” It’s a disappointingly cheap reliance on stereotype for a book that otherwise manages its themes pretty well.

There are many pages of descriptions of how water purification plants work. All of this went entirely above my head, and while it’s impressive that Griffith has such a base of scientific knowledge and/or did so much research, I have to say that it was extremely boring to me and I really wanted to skim those parts. Then again, I also had no idea what was happening with all of the PIDA hacking that Spanner and Lore were doing…this might just be why I tend to like fantasy more than sci-fi.

Finally, while I’m happy that Lore ended the book reunited with her family and entering a positive new romantic relationship, I kind of think that the romance with Magyar developed out of nowhere; it felt like Magyar really disliked her until the very end and they mostly just talked about water plant business until *poof* romance happened! Overall I say 3.5 stars and I’ll definitely be interested in reading more by Nicola Griffith.

Liked this, didn't love it. Lore is trying to reconcile her multiple lives -- her childhood of privilege and abuse as an heir to a wealthy family, her recent past living in the cracks of society, getting by with theft, drugs and porn, and her present where she tries to rebuild an honest life on her own. The story jumps back and forth between the three, but I only really cared about the present version of her. And the twist at the end felt like the author trying to be clever, rather than something that fit with the rest of the plot.

But there are moments in this book that will stick with me -- particularly the metaphor of the rain forest, and how the creatures of the canopy have no idea what is going on below.

I picked this up after reading Hild, and it's hard to believe they're by the same author. Very different types of books.

This is one of my all time favorite books. In this intricately detailed speculative thriller the protagonist, upon leaving her girlfriend, builds a tiny garden out of a postage stamp yard filled with rubble outside her apartment, while in the midst of an intrigue involving her work on the use of genetically engineered flora in cleaning up water systems.

Great book, but I would have loved for it to last longer. Beautifully descriptive, although the end felt abbreviated.

Starts promising but never really goes anywhere beyond pretty trite soap opera abuse and redemption narratives. I never found myself believing that Lore, the narrator/main character, actually is a good person instead of just being very concerned with being perceived as one despite her awful family and her own awful actions. This story would've been a lot better if Lore wasn't some hyper-competent heiress. Yawn.

Yet another ridiculously lovely book. I'm always astonished at the depth and the research Nicola Griffith invests in her work (I never thought I'd so thoroughly enjoy the technical details of water remediation!), and how every single character she touches on feels like a full and, if not sympathetic, explicable person.

Obviously I'm a Griffith fangirl. I don't think she could write a bad novel if somebody paid her to do it.

I would have given this book 3.5 stars, were that possible. I loved the characters and the technical language of water reclamation. I thought the central metaphor of the slow river of the title worked well, covering the literal water work the protagonist does, the symbolic currents of history, and a river's potential to cleanse or drown.
That said, I was unclear about when and where this novel was set. It's a dystopian future with slides for transport and identity implants, but people also watch TV, plant seeds in actual dirt, and drink beer. I would have liked more terraforming and less sex, but that's probably just the old Trekkie in me.