mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

As this novel opens, fifteen-year-old Vern Riley is on the run from the Black separatist cult that raised her and forced her to marry its abusive leader. Alone in the woods, heavily pregnant and suffering hallucinations, she manages to evade capture and gives birth to twins, whom she then raises all on her own in the wilderness for years. If you're thinking this doesn't sound like something an ordinary teenager could plausibly do, you're dead right, and the same thought occurs to Vern. She realizes her body is changing—getting stronger, healing faster. But what she doesn't yet realize is that her strange powers are inextricably linked with the cult's origins and its secret purpose. To find answers she'll have to leave her forest isolation and, for the first time in her life, confront the wider world and its people.

I had mixed feelings about this book. Its themes are powerful, dealing with the exploitation of marginalized people's bodies on both interpersonal and systemic levels, and exploring possibilities for healing and connection in the face of that. Queer love, especially, is centered, and queer characters are allowed to make mistakes and to be really fucked up without being hopeless, powerless, or unworthy of happiness, and that was great.

But I felt the presentation of the material was uneven. Though I didn't disagree with any of the book's political points, they were sometimes made in a distractingly heavy-handed way, like the story had to come to a halt while the author delivered a lecture. Structurally, the pacing sometimes dragged, to the point where I'd be flipping ahead to see how much longer until the plot moved. And the plot itself was a little hand-wavey, despite some pretty big exposition dumps near the end.

spoilery plot discussion

It turns out the real power behind the cult is the US government, which infiltrated a Black separatist movement back in the '60s so they could establish this cult and use its members as test subjects for a program to create supersoldiers. Vern learns this with the help of a Lakota doctor she befriends and falls in love with, who also helps Vern understand the source of her powers. A fungus is growing inside Vern's body which, in addition to super strength and super healing, eventually gives her psychic powers including mind-control, an exoskeleton that can deflect bullets, and the ability to resurrect the recently-dead. She basically becomes so powerful that even the US military can't stop her, and she returns with her new allies to free the cult members from the compound.

In its broad strokes, this makes sense. But aspects that aren't explained include where this fungus came from, how it functions, why only certain people gain these powers from it, how the government knows who those people are, and why the government agents seem so unprepared to fight Vern when they should know her abilities and how much of a threat she is. (There was another fungal supersoldier in government custody with powers even more developed than Vern's, so they shouldn't be caught off guard!)

The book is definitely more interested in Vern's character development and relationships with other people than in the specifics of the premise. And yet, at the end of the book, the direction Vern's life will take next is left somewhat open-ended. It seems like the idea is that she's going to continue to use her powers to fight oppression, almost reading like a superhero origin story. (It reminded me a little of Unbreakable in that way.) But it's pointed out that now that she's turned the tables on the oppressors and she has the power, she will face the temptation of abusing her power too. I was relieved that this is a problem the narrative actually worries about, especially after getting burned by The Future of Another Timeline's gross mishandling of similar themes, though I would have liked to see it explored in more depth. It's also suggested that Vern would kind of like to have a peaceful life with her kids and girlfriend after all this shit has happened, which, again, is something a lot of superheroes can relate to! I felt like maybe the book could have used a "five years later" epilogue or something to bring a stronger conclusion to Vern's arc.

Overall, for me, this was a case of good ideas and iffy execution. Solomon has two other books, An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep, and I'm not sure if I want to try them or not. Anybody have thoughts on those?