This book is intensely about grief—usually my bag, but oh my god, it hits incredibly hard, unrelentingly, and for 300 pages! Because grief is usually my bag, I found parts of this book absolutely outstanding. This is literary sci fi, character driven; comparisons to Station Eleven are apt not only because of the pandemic parallel—which again, phew, the grief—but because of the sense the prose renders: that we are following people more than the plague. In fact I would say it's a book about death more than anything: the social and scientific consequences of the plague, both direct and indirect, are mostly explored through the lens of death.

Grief layers in this book. Grief for children, for the elderly, for peers; for individual and collective futures, for individual and collective pasts, for the planet, for humanity, all through the lens of an alien pandemic. Like much good speculative fiction, this book looks forward and roots hope out of the ashes. It imagines the failures of humanity and its triumphs. The short story format broadly worked for me, especially the way stories overlapped and particularly in light of the last one. The prose was gorgeous, though a small handful of stories went on too long; and because the topic was, unrelentingly, grief, the consequence was a feeling of emotionally monotony despite the excellent prose.

That said, I don't think in hindsight it was that monotonous in its approach. There's a chapter in the middle that I found darkly hilarious about Snoutorious P.I.G., an organ-growing pig who, thanks to the gene splicing that allows it to grow the organs to save people, develops humanlike sentience.

Spoiler

Of course it ends badly; it was a real Never Let Me Go moment. But this is a prime example of how grief is actually explored quite creatively in this book. The main scientist and surrogate father for Snoutorious lost his son to the pandemic in a previous chapter, and partially finds healing in serving as father to this pig. Snoutorious eventually dies because of the very gene splicing that created him—not directly by the plague, but by the plague in the sense that he was created in response to the dire need for lifesaving treatments. This book was great for exploring the different kinds of consequences to widespread death in this way.

I was often riveted and finished this in two sittings. I think my rating is higher than a 4, but rounded down for execution: some chapters simply wallowed for too long, prioritizing intensity of tragedy over literary impact. Like holy shit, the chapter about the amusement park for dying kids. Incredible concept, but it had to be 30% shorter to land. Still, the structure made this book work; multiple POVs enabled the complex exploration of disease, death, and life that made this book so interesting. It also works as a good bit of speculative fiction: the sense of real people seeking out and living different futures. Restores a bit of hope in the idea that, despite the socially fragmented response to COVID, people could still come together in the wake of disaster and make something of a future.