lunabee34

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really love this book; I was absolutely riveted the entire time I was reading it. It reminds me of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake series but is in no way derivative. I think what I like best about Vandermeer is how absolutely weird and novel and unpredictable his imagination is. I never see whatever he's got up his sleeve coming.

For that reason, I don't want to spoil anything about the novel except for in the broadest strokes. I would say this is set in a post-apocalyptic world except the apocalypse seems ongoing and interminable. Rachel and Wick have eked out a pretty good existence in a place dominated by a giant, murderous bear who can fly when Rachel encounters Borne, some wholly new sort of sentient being whom she begins to treat like a child. Their relationship will have pretty extreme consequences for everyone living in the City.



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I am so taken with this novel. It's so so good, y'all. I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I finished.


I love the twists at the end. I love that Wick took Rachel's memories because she asked him to spare her the pain of remembering her parents' murders.

I love how Wick slowly becomes a person I really care about as a reader; in the beginning, Rachel's narration vacillates between antagonistic and ambivalent toward him. She's so concerned with Borne that Wick really only appears as an obstacle. Slowly, slowly, though, he becomes a fascinating character in his own right, and by the end, I care about him as much as I care about Rachel and Borne.

Oh, my heart. Finding out that Wick is biotech and Rachel probably is, too, and that Mord started out as a person makes all Borne's questions of personhood and what makes a person so much more poignant.

And my heart again for Borne who loves Rachel and even Wick, I think, though Wick gives him little reason to, and who wants to be what he thinks makes a good person even though the nature of his being seems at odds with that goal--Borne who gives his life to make the apocalypse a little more bearable rather than live and become something monstrous.

The moment when it's revealed that the city could be anywhere--somewhere on earth or another planet or in another dimension or reality--but probably not anywhere contiguous with our earthly reality is really cool. The idea of shoving all your fucked up science into a pocket universe for experimentation and etc. is a very brilliant (I mean, horrible) one. Also, that moment when you realize the Company building is full of hundreds of inert Bornes meant to be given to children in the guise of toys!! is heart stopping.