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In a small community on the Oregon coast in the middle of the twenty-first century, disease ravages the civilized world and the human race is saved, but is transformed by genetic engineering
- GenresScience Fiction
Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
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56 people want to read
About the author
Stephanie A. Smith
29 books109 followersStephanie A. Smith holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and teaches American Literature at the University of Florida. She studied fiction with both Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Cunningham, and is the author of six novels, including the recent WARPAINT Trilogy (Thames River Press) and two books of criticism, along with numerous essays, chapters, reviews and short stories.
http://www.stephanieasmith.net for more!
http://www.stephanieasmith.net for more!
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 25, 2009
This book really surprised me. I've bought hundreds of books at our annual booksale here, and I got this one there for 50 cents. I think, now, it is one of the best purchases I have made.
The book starts out a little slow, but not in a bad way. Just a nice, steady pace. From there, it just builds and builds from a simple narrative into a fullblown "sci-fi" (it's not high tech, but still counts), fast paced story. By the end, the story was progressing so rapidly and excitingly, that first I was on the edge of my seat, then I was up and pacing as I read it.
It ends sweetly and hopefully. I don't like to give away details and spoilers in my reviews, and I won't here, but I encourage everyone, Sci-Fi fans and non-fans alike, to read this.
The book starts out a little slow, but not in a bad way. Just a nice, steady pace. From there, it just builds and builds from a simple narrative into a fullblown "sci-fi" (it's not high tech, but still counts), fast paced story. By the end, the story was progressing so rapidly and excitingly, that first I was on the edge of my seat, then I was up and pacing as I read it.
It ends sweetly and hopefully. I don't like to give away details and spoilers in my reviews, and I won't here, but I encourage everyone, Sci-Fi fans and non-fans alike, to read this.
December 4, 2014
Beautifully, often lyrically written. But the language was so opaque and the cast and time changes so frequent I had a hard time keeping up to what was going on. 2.5 stars.
August 2, 2007
This post-apocalyptic novel tells the story of a tiny community on the Oregon shore where the last few members of the human race are desperately clinging to each other, what memories are left of civilization and denial about how odd their children are. It's dark and sad, but beautifully written, focusing on the intense and dangerous relationships between the characters.
July 6, 2011
This is a really weird young adult sci-fi that leaves lots of unanswered questions and has a really strange twist (not much of a twist since it's apparent pretty early on, but still). I liked it though, got sucked into it, and thought the writing was beautiful in parts and the world (a dystopian-type future world) really easy to bring to life.
December 19, 2022
Deaf reader reviewing books with deaf characters. This book is listed on my ranked list of books with deaf characters.
I really hated this, largely because Smith is metaphorizing and mythologizing disability and being heavy-handed with the eugenics rhetoric even while trying to couch the novel in mystery.
There are several deaf characters, all of whom are children. The oldest is Tomas Nitehammer, who is also featured most prominently, and most problematically. Smith's treatment of Tomas, as I will discuss, is sickening.
At the start of the novel, Tomas is probably between 11 and 14 years old--it is never made clear. He was born deaf, having misshapen ears, but it is much later revealed that he can hear high-pitched noises like clicking/ticking and whistling. This answers for his initially "mysterious" fascination with antique clocks.
The only sound Tomas is able to make, apparently, is a clicking sound (mimicking the clocks, presumably), but it is strange that he is unable to make any other noise, aside from a sonorous, high-pitched wail that no one (not even his father, who is often with him!) seems to realize is his until halfway through the novel. It makes no sense. Also weird is that, from what I can gather from the author's descriptions, Thomas has very long hair that perfectly conceals his private parts when he comes out of the water. Like…why? (Later it's revealed that the children have ambiguous genitalia, so presumably this Birth-of-Venus type concealment is meant to keep that mystery until the end. But was it really necessary? Come on.)
As is a common mythological trope with hearing writers utilizing deaf characters, Tomas somehow moves and laughs silently. This demonstrates Smith has never met a deaf person--we are incredibly loud, as we cannot hear ourselves! More mythconceptions from Smith include that Tomas had always been a perfect, gentle baby, so no one had noticed his deafness--even though his ears are misshapen? And, in the second half of the novel, Tomas suddenly becomes able to hear whistles and trills, at which point it’s revealed that for an unknown amount of time, Tomas had been able to hear high-pitched sounds. This forced plot twist is frustrating because the author, through the other characters (including his father), explicitly presents Tomas as being totally deaf throughout the novel until this point. Basically, why would Tomas's stepmother have noticed his ability to hear and not his father?
Also annoying is Smith's use of an epithet with Tomas: Tomas was/did something “lovely and” not-lovely. He is always described with some kind of irony or oxymoron or what I assume is meant to be poetry. Examples: “hard and lovely and sharp”; “lovely and unexpected”. Literally, please shut up. Smith is bashing readers over the head with Tomas's "otherworldliness" with this.
There are three characters who primarily think about and/or interact with Tomas: his father Nathaniel, a villager named Emily, and his stepmother (whose name I have forgotten).
Nathaniel:
He often accompanies Tomas swimming at night. Nathaniel wrestles with knowing Tomas can take care of himself and feeling protective of him. He is the only character I do not hate in this novel, the only character who behaves like a sincere and goodhearted human being. I'll leave it at that.
Emily:
This woman is the most hateful character in the novel. I hate her with a burning passion that causes bile to rise in my throat every time I have to think of her--like right now. I keep skipping this section of the review to come back to it, and now I have to reckon with what Smith has forced me to witness.
Emily hates and fears Tomas. She herself recognizes she has no reason to dislike Tomas, and that she just resents his existence. Simply because her father and others (including her husband Sean) believed disabled babies and children ought to be murdered so they didn’t grow up and learn they were “crippled.”
She chases/sends Tomas away on occasion, doesn’t want him around her, and thinks that:
“He’d always been both alluring and frightening; his eyes—oval, grayish-green, and glassy—were strange, too large. They dominated his snub-nosed face and seemed to hide it, unless they were screened behind his overgrown hair—then, with his thin-lipped mouth unsmiling, he seemed sullen. She thought him both lovely and a little horrifying. Certainly unteachable. And the way he watched people, never speaking, never having learned to speak, in fact, except for an odd noise he made infrequently, a clicking in the back of his throat.”
Emily is consistently an asshole. When Nathaniel falls and gets trapped on the beach with the tide coming in, Tomas runs to her and literally begs her for help (on his knees and everything), and although she recognizes something terrible has happened, she leaves him anyway. Ultimately, Tomas risks his own life to save his father.
Later we find out that Emily often wished Tomas would die from some disease or accident—of course, this was before she realized that all the newborns were “deformed” and her future child(ren) would be disabled as well. Her tune sure changed quick with that realization!
But the absolute most sickening decision Smith makes in this novel is with Tomas's puberty. So, after Tomas saves his father and brings him to the nearest house (Emily's), where he is forced to recuperate, Emily and Nathaniel get together. (Never mind that Emily's husband is away on business. He's late in getting back; therefore, he must be dead, right?) But anyway, Emily and Nathaniel are *clearly* together.
Emily gets pregnant and her milk comes in. And here comes Tomas, who is predatory with puberty. Emily just stands there and allows him to undress her, then touch and mouth her breasts. Literally. What. The. Fuck.
Even worse? After giving birth, Emily reveals that the baby is Tomas's. At this point, Tomas cannot be older than 16. Not if at the beginning of the novel he is a child who hasn't gone through puberty, which is what the author suggests.
But wait! There's more! Tomas was also pregnant, apparently, and gives birth to his own baby around the same time Emily births his child.
It's getting super complicated here, isn't it? I agree. But anyway, as all this panic surrounding Tomas's labor is going on, Emily is upstairs with Sean, who has managed to return from his trip but is super sick. She murders Sean while he is in the throes of his fever, then suicides herself. This leaves her newborn (who looks more seal than human) to be cared for by Tomas, which is fine because he has enough nipples to breastfeed both babies, right?
I just....Need to move on.
Communication:
Sign language: Nathaniel is a polyglot but never learned signs; therefore, he and Tomas use a home sign system and gestures, and Tomas refuses to learn to write. Why don’t any of the other villagers learn this system? Never addressed.
Lindi mentions having communication/arguments with Tomas but it’s not clear how they are communicating, and no one bothers to ask. (For all their despair about what to do with the children, they never really spend any time talking to them about their needs/experiences, which is both realistic and frustrating.) It later becomes clear that Lindi and Tomas are using their whistling clicking seal language to communicate with one another.
Other deaf children:
New baby Jett (several months old by the end of the novel) is deaf. Character Sandra believes all children will be born with some form of deafness. Baby Pat presumed deaf based on malformed ears. Lindi, 11, is hard of hearing—she can’t hear tones in the lower range, but she never seems to have hearing difficulties in the story.
Apparently all the children are also born with missing or ambiguous genitalia (making them intersex), but no one will just out and say anything so it’s confusing. Smith is determined to make her audience just as clueless as the shitty adults in her novel.
Rhetoric:
Every disability is perceived and discussed by adults through a deficit lens, even though none of the children seem to view themselves as lesser than. But we don't know much about the children's onto-epistemology, as the novel seems to be more about the adults accepting their fates or whatever.
There is also quite a range of disabilities, although I don’t understand why there isn’t more of a trend rather than accidents for every single birth. Medications often lead to one type of congenital malformation or disability, and radiation leads to more miscarriages and cancers rather than anything else. There’s no explanation for what’s causing any of these children to be born with limb and sensory differences. Alice points out that “birth defects shouldn’t be so regular,” and this is still unexplained at the end, though it’s suggested that seal DNA was somehow merged with human women’s to result in intersex were-seals. Yet this also doesn't account for the how or why of Tomas's ability to conceive with Emily (barf).
Lastly:
“[P]estilence is deaf and dumb and very, very patient.” This quote, appearing alongside a discussion of the children (specifically Tomas) specifically embodies Tomas as disease. Tomas comes to represent all the children, because he is the eldest and "most" deformed of them all.
I'm just very tired.
I really hated this, largely because Smith is metaphorizing and mythologizing disability and being heavy-handed with the eugenics rhetoric even while trying to couch the novel in mystery.
There are several deaf characters, all of whom are children. The oldest is Tomas Nitehammer, who is also featured most prominently, and most problematically. Smith's treatment of Tomas, as I will discuss, is sickening.
At the start of the novel, Tomas is probably between 11 and 14 years old--it is never made clear. He was born deaf, having misshapen ears, but it is much later revealed that he can hear high-pitched noises like clicking/ticking and whistling. This answers for his initially "mysterious" fascination with antique clocks.
The only sound Tomas is able to make, apparently, is a clicking sound (mimicking the clocks, presumably), but it is strange that he is unable to make any other noise, aside from a sonorous, high-pitched wail that no one (not even his father, who is often with him!) seems to realize is his until halfway through the novel. It makes no sense. Also weird is that, from what I can gather from the author's descriptions, Thomas has very long hair that perfectly conceals his private parts when he comes out of the water. Like…why? (Later it's revealed that the children have ambiguous genitalia, so presumably this Birth-of-Venus type concealment is meant to keep that mystery until the end. But was it really necessary? Come on.)
As is a common mythological trope with hearing writers utilizing deaf characters, Tomas somehow moves and laughs silently. This demonstrates Smith has never met a deaf person--we are incredibly loud, as we cannot hear ourselves! More mythconceptions from Smith include that Tomas had always been a perfect, gentle baby, so no one had noticed his deafness--even though his ears are misshapen? And, in the second half of the novel, Tomas suddenly becomes able to hear whistles and trills, at which point it’s revealed that for an unknown amount of time, Tomas had been able to hear high-pitched sounds. This forced plot twist is frustrating because the author, through the other characters (including his father), explicitly presents Tomas as being totally deaf throughout the novel until this point. Basically, why would Tomas's stepmother have noticed his ability to hear and not his father?
Also annoying is Smith's use of an epithet with Tomas: Tomas was/did something “lovely and” not-lovely. He is always described with some kind of irony or oxymoron or what I assume is meant to be poetry. Examples: “hard and lovely and sharp”; “lovely and unexpected”. Literally, please shut up. Smith is bashing readers over the head with Tomas's "otherworldliness" with this.
There are three characters who primarily think about and/or interact with Tomas: his father Nathaniel, a villager named Emily, and his stepmother (whose name I have forgotten).
Nathaniel:
He often accompanies Tomas swimming at night. Nathaniel wrestles with knowing Tomas can take care of himself and feeling protective of him. He is the only character I do not hate in this novel, the only character who behaves like a sincere and goodhearted human being. I'll leave it at that.
Emily:
This woman is the most hateful character in the novel. I hate her with a burning passion that causes bile to rise in my throat every time I have to think of her--like right now. I keep skipping this section of the review to come back to it, and now I have to reckon with what Smith has forced me to witness.
Emily hates and fears Tomas. She herself recognizes she has no reason to dislike Tomas, and that she just resents his existence. Simply because her father and others (including her husband Sean) believed disabled babies and children ought to be murdered so they didn’t grow up and learn they were “crippled.”
She chases/sends Tomas away on occasion, doesn’t want him around her, and thinks that:
“He’d always been both alluring and frightening; his eyes—oval, grayish-green, and glassy—were strange, too large. They dominated his snub-nosed face and seemed to hide it, unless they were screened behind his overgrown hair—then, with his thin-lipped mouth unsmiling, he seemed sullen. She thought him both lovely and a little horrifying. Certainly unteachable. And the way he watched people, never speaking, never having learned to speak, in fact, except for an odd noise he made infrequently, a clicking in the back of his throat.”
Emily is consistently an asshole. When Nathaniel falls and gets trapped on the beach with the tide coming in, Tomas runs to her and literally begs her for help (on his knees and everything), and although she recognizes something terrible has happened, she leaves him anyway. Ultimately, Tomas risks his own life to save his father.
Later we find out that Emily often wished Tomas would die from some disease or accident—of course, this was before she realized that all the newborns were “deformed” and her future child(ren) would be disabled as well. Her tune sure changed quick with that realization!
But the absolute most sickening decision Smith makes in this novel is with Tomas's puberty. So, after Tomas saves his father and brings him to the nearest house (Emily's), where he is forced to recuperate, Emily and Nathaniel get together. (Never mind that Emily's husband is away on business. He's late in getting back; therefore, he must be dead, right?) But anyway, Emily and Nathaniel are *clearly* together.
Emily gets pregnant and her milk comes in. And here comes Tomas, who is predatory with puberty. Emily just stands there and allows him to undress her, then touch and mouth her breasts. Literally. What. The. Fuck.
Even worse? After giving birth, Emily reveals that the baby is Tomas's. At this point, Tomas cannot be older than 16. Not if at the beginning of the novel he is a child who hasn't gone through puberty, which is what the author suggests.
But wait! There's more! Tomas was also pregnant, apparently, and gives birth to his own baby around the same time Emily births his child.
It's getting super complicated here, isn't it? I agree. But anyway, as all this panic surrounding Tomas's labor is going on, Emily is upstairs with Sean, who has managed to return from his trip but is super sick. She murders Sean while he is in the throes of his fever, then suicides herself. This leaves her newborn (who looks more seal than human) to be cared for by Tomas, which is fine because he has enough nipples to breastfeed both babies, right?
I just....Need to move on.
Communication:
Sign language: Nathaniel is a polyglot but never learned signs; therefore, he and Tomas use a home sign system and gestures, and Tomas refuses to learn to write. Why don’t any of the other villagers learn this system? Never addressed.
Lindi mentions having communication/arguments with Tomas but it’s not clear how they are communicating, and no one bothers to ask. (For all their despair about what to do with the children, they never really spend any time talking to them about their needs/experiences, which is both realistic and frustrating.) It later becomes clear that Lindi and Tomas are using their whistling clicking seal language to communicate with one another.
Other deaf children:
New baby Jett (several months old by the end of the novel) is deaf. Character Sandra believes all children will be born with some form of deafness. Baby Pat presumed deaf based on malformed ears. Lindi, 11, is hard of hearing—she can’t hear tones in the lower range, but she never seems to have hearing difficulties in the story.
Apparently all the children are also born with missing or ambiguous genitalia (making them intersex), but no one will just out and say anything so it’s confusing. Smith is determined to make her audience just as clueless as the shitty adults in her novel.
Rhetoric:
Every disability is perceived and discussed by adults through a deficit lens, even though none of the children seem to view themselves as lesser than. But we don't know much about the children's onto-epistemology, as the novel seems to be more about the adults accepting their fates or whatever.
There is also quite a range of disabilities, although I don’t understand why there isn’t more of a trend rather than accidents for every single birth. Medications often lead to one type of congenital malformation or disability, and radiation leads to more miscarriages and cancers rather than anything else. There’s no explanation for what’s causing any of these children to be born with limb and sensory differences. Alice points out that “birth defects shouldn’t be so regular,” and this is still unexplained at the end, though it’s suggested that seal DNA was somehow merged with human women’s to result in intersex were-seals. Yet this also doesn't account for the how or why of Tomas's ability to conceive with Emily (barf).
Lastly:
“[P]estilence is deaf and dumb and very, very patient.” This quote, appearing alongside a discussion of the children (specifically Tomas) specifically embodies Tomas as disease. Tomas comes to represent all the children, because he is the eldest and "most" deformed of them all.
I'm just very tired.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews