An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (Akashic Books, 2017)
★★★★★
(content warning: implied rape, domestic abuse, child harm, self-harm)
A generation ship travels through space, its decks stratified along the racist/classist lines of the antebellum South. In the ship’s lowdeck slums, Aster, an alchematician and botanist, investigates her mother’s mysterious suicide and its link to the untimely illness of the ship’s holy Sovereign.
First of all, I just loved this whole premise, which brought to mind Snowpiercer or perhaps The Book of the Long Sun (which I’ve yet to read). I was fascinated by the cultural, linguistic, and technological drift encapsulated in the first scene, where Aster (who can travel unencumbered between decks) helps a family build an alcohol stove to keep warm, and the recipe is so valuable as to merit one of their warmest cloaks in return.
Speculative elements aside, though, this story is realistic about the great harms of slavery. White enforcers systematically violate black and brown bodies, and in a scene I found particularly chilling, children play by emulating patriarchal domestic violence. The suffering of the oppressed only becomes more and more brutal as the novel goes on. (More on this later.)
Against this backdrop, we are presented with a story entirely about non-binary people and women.
Aster’s mother disappeared shortly after she was born, leaving only a suicide note and a broken radiolabe. This mystery—on a ship where mothers are the bearers of memory, the ones who memorate the Great Lifehouse their ship originally fled—leaves Aster disconnected and adrift. Though the “hormonal disturbances” of the lowdecks mean Aster’s masculine features are unexceptional, her bunkmates harass her for her neuroatypicality. She finds sanctuary in her botanarium, where she breeds plants and synthesizes medicines, and among her mother’s cryptic journals.
Theo, the ship’s non-binary Surgeon and Aster’s mentor, also provides Aster with a form of refuge. Theo reminded me a bit of Laurent from Captive Prince: he presents effeminately by the ship’s norms, and follows a similar arc of navigating his own trauma. The careful (that is, full of care) relationship between Aster and Theo is a wonderful focus of the book that grants both characters space to breathe and shine. When Theo is shown adjusting his words to account for Aster’s propensity to take things literally, or when Aster notices Theo’s discomfort around Lieutenant, it’s easy to see why the two cherish each other. And these are far from the only forms of care, and far from the only caregivers, we witness.
Yet the world they inhabit is a harsh one. The characters hurt and harm each other—not always intentionally, but in what Solomon establishes is a function of being in and making sense of their terrible surroundings. A young Aster obliviously squanders the film from a priceless ancient camera. Aster’s spirit-sister, Giselle, is a pyromaniac, and destroys several irreplaceable things. They’ve all drawn their lines with each other out of necessity, but these lines are tested in complex ways: if Theo has promised Aster he’ll never enter her lab without her permission, but he thinks she might hurt herself, what should he do? If Giselle burns herself, does Aster have a right to stop it? The way the characters navigated their boundaries in these increasingly difficult scenarios made a powerful statement about how we care for each other in times of stress and trauma.
While I didn’t connect that strongly with the themes of motherhood and ancestry at time of reading, several intriguing developments kept me invested in the plot and Aster’s quest to find out what happened to her mother. I also appreciated that Solomon challenged the stereotypical relationship between women and children by presenting Aint Melusine, a character who is read by others as “a motherly type [because] I’m brown and dowdy” despite disliking children herself.