Gabrielle (Reading Rampage)'s Reviews > Blackfish City

3 and a half stars.

I am not sure what to make of this one. It was full of amazing ideas, but I feel like they were not explored deeply enough to be fully satisfying.

In the not too far future, a lot of the world has flooded and many people live in the floating city of Qaanaaq, near Iceland. This city is home to refugees from all over the world, but the true power in a place like this is in the hands of the landlords who own the living spaces and the shareholders who helped finance the creation of the city. Everyone else, in their own way, struggles. A strange disease is making is turning into an epidemic: known simply as “the breaks”, the disease seems to be sexually transmitted, but affects mostly the poor and destitute of Qaanaaq. The breaks causes a sort of confusion, what seems to be hallucinations and visions of memories that don’t belong to the sick person. It’s in this world that Ankit, Kaev, Soq and Fill scrape a living. Their lives are very different, and they do not seem to be connected in any way, but the arrival of a strange woman, riding an orca and followed by a polar bear, will change everything, and reveal the bonds that unite them just below the surface.

At first, I thought that the breaks might have been a metaphor for AIDS, but I now think it’s more about interconnectedness – but you’ll have to read the book to see what changed my mind about it. I really loved the idea of the floating city, the grit and strange politics of such a place being richly imagined by Miller, but as mentioned earlier, I wish we had explored it a little bit more. We only got enough information and description to place the characters in their settings and better understand their lives, and I craved a broader view of Qaanaaq. A lot of emphasis was put on making the cast of characters very diverse, and it was wonderful to read about those people who felt real and not stereotypical.

I read that Sam Miller’s work was mostly YA, and maybe that’s why I found “Blackfish City” to be just shy of fully satisfying; I wanted the envelope to be pushed just a little further. Nevertheless, the ideas explored in this book are brilliant, the pacing and the compassionate writing make this a lovely work of post-apocalyptic fiction.