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.