Scan barcode
A review by brice_mo
This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour
1.75
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the ARC!
Mateo Askaripour’s This Great Hemisphere is a YA-tinged piece of speculative fiction that gets bogged down in inconsequential world-building. The Hunger Games crowd will love it, so if that’s you, I think you’ll you have a great time, and you should probably just skip my review and read the book!
The premise brims with potential—in 2028, a child is born invisible; in 2529, we follow a society that has been racially segregated by “Invisibles” and the “Dominant Population.” Our protagonist, an Invisible woman named Sweetmint, is discovering some social mobility as an inventor until her missing brother is accused of murder. Sounds exciting, right?
Unfortunately, this speculative fiction doesn’t spend much time speculating, and it does very little else to make up for it.
There is power in defamiliarizing a subject to approach it in new ways, but I don’t think This Great Hemisphere does so successfully. It's just so literal. For example, there are fast food restaurants placed in Invisible neighborhoods to shorten the population’s lifespan. Elsewhere, we see transparently recognizable versions of police brutality. With such on-the-nose narrative moves, it's unclear to me why this was written as a sci-fi novel at all. “What if there were racism?” isn’t really a novel take, and when it merely re-labels many of the violent realities we currently witness, it almost feels flippant. These issues seem co-opted as window dressing because there’s no real commentary—the world is too similar to our own for the author to offer new perspectives. (To be fair, near the end of the book, there’s a comment that “everything is cyclical,” but it feels unearned).
Honestly, I wonder if we’ve just passed the cultural moment where this type of storytelling is effective.
It’s telling that the novel’s opening prelude—the birth of the first Invisible in 2028—is far more conceptually and narratively interesting than the main plot in 2529. There's a reason successful books of this ilk, such as The Handmaid's Tale, take place in the near future—these stories find their catalyst in proximity, the way we teeter on the edge of even harsher realities if only a few things change. These stories allow us to analyze our current cultural circumstances by exploring their natural conclusions.
Similarly, the first chapter of This Great Hemisphere sets up an exciting novel, but it isn't the one we get to read. The Invisible child’s mother is Black, and we see her experiencing various forms of discrimination before giving birth. I think there’s a better story in that timeline about how race and identity would be understood if their physical markers were suddenly gone. In the 2529 plot, it doesn’t matter—we essentially just have the word “Invisible” substituted in each time “Black” would occur. If the book weren’t so exposition-heavy and keen on highlighting the world’s mechanics, I can imagine that something so simple would be make for a powerful novella. At over 400 pages, though, The Great Hemisphere undermines itself at every turn.
None of this would be an issue with great characters, but they are painted in the broadest strokes possible, archetypical in service of a frictionless story. If you’ve ever encountered YA dystopia, you know the drill. This issue is compounded by multiple POVs, a decision that seems intended to showcase the complexities of the book’s subject matter. As a side note, one character makes an anachronistic reference to Pinky and the Brain (yes, in 2529), which just feels like further evidence that this story shouldn’t have been set in the future.
Ultimately, I know This Great Hemisphere will probably really click with its dystopia-loving audience. If you’re a reader that finds comfort in the consistency of certain tropes, there’s enough fun world-building here that I’m sure you’ll have a great time; just don’t expect to see anything new.
Mateo Askaripour’s This Great Hemisphere is a YA-tinged piece of speculative fiction that gets bogged down in inconsequential world-building. The Hunger Games crowd will love it, so if that’s you, I think you’ll you have a great time, and you should probably just skip my review and read the book!
The premise brims with potential—in 2028, a child is born invisible; in 2529, we follow a society that has been racially segregated by “Invisibles” and the “Dominant Population.” Our protagonist, an Invisible woman named Sweetmint, is discovering some social mobility as an inventor until her missing brother is accused of murder. Sounds exciting, right?
Unfortunately, this speculative fiction doesn’t spend much time speculating, and it does very little else to make up for it.
There is power in defamiliarizing a subject to approach it in new ways, but I don’t think This Great Hemisphere does so successfully. It's just so literal. For example, there are fast food restaurants placed in Invisible neighborhoods to shorten the population’s lifespan. Elsewhere, we see transparently recognizable versions of police brutality. With such on-the-nose narrative moves, it's unclear to me why this was written as a sci-fi novel at all. “What if there were racism?” isn’t really a novel take, and when it merely re-labels many of the violent realities we currently witness, it almost feels flippant. These issues seem co-opted as window dressing because there’s no real commentary—the world is too similar to our own for the author to offer new perspectives. (To be fair, near the end of the book, there’s a comment that “everything is cyclical,” but it feels unearned).
Honestly, I wonder if we’ve just passed the cultural moment where this type of storytelling is effective.
It’s telling that the novel’s opening prelude—the birth of the first Invisible in 2028—is far more conceptually and narratively interesting than the main plot in 2529. There's a reason successful books of this ilk, such as The Handmaid's Tale, take place in the near future—these stories find their catalyst in proximity, the way we teeter on the edge of even harsher realities if only a few things change. These stories allow us to analyze our current cultural circumstances by exploring their natural conclusions.
Similarly, the first chapter of This Great Hemisphere sets up an exciting novel, but it isn't the one we get to read. The Invisible child’s mother is Black, and we see her experiencing various forms of discrimination before giving birth. I think there’s a better story in that timeline about how race and identity would be understood if their physical markers were suddenly gone. In the 2529 plot, it doesn’t matter—we essentially just have the word “Invisible” substituted in each time “Black” would occur. If the book weren’t so exposition-heavy and keen on highlighting the world’s mechanics, I can imagine that something so simple would be make for a powerful novella. At over 400 pages, though, The Great Hemisphere undermines itself at every turn.
None of this would be an issue with great characters, but they are painted in the broadest strokes possible, archetypical in service of a frictionless story. If you’ve ever encountered YA dystopia, you know the drill. This issue is compounded by multiple POVs, a decision that seems intended to showcase the complexities of the book’s subject matter. As a side note, one character makes an anachronistic reference to Pinky and the Brain (yes, in 2529), which just feels like further evidence that this story shouldn’t have been set in the future.
Ultimately, I know This Great Hemisphere will probably really click with its dystopia-loving audience. If you’re a reader that finds comfort in the consistency of certain tropes, there’s enough fun world-building here that I’m sure you’ll have a great time; just don’t expect to see anything new.