Aug 9

Aug 9 How High We Go in the Dark

Author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
Publisher: William Morrow
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.

Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

TL;DR Review

How High We Go in the Dark is a heartfelt, unsettling book set in a near future riddled with plague and climate change. I enjoyed some chapters more than others, but liked the book overall.

For you if: You like novels made of connected short stories, like Olive Kitteridge.

Full Review

How High We Go in the Dark has gotten a lot of buzz since it was released, and I was excited to read it. And while I enjoyed some of its chapters more than others, I definitely liked it overall.

Each chapter of this book focuses on different characters and jumps forward in time, so it spans a few generations. In the first chapter, climate change releases a plague that had been frozen in the arctic ice. The rest of the book examines how the world reacts, and it’s heavy — from funerals becoming highly commercialized to euthanasia theme parks to give terminally ill children one final happy day and a pain-free ending. But there are also happy moments, hopeful moments, and moments of beauty.

So as I’ve alluded to, this book is actually told in a format that’s much more like linked short stories — think Olive Kitteridge or Disappearing Earth. (I thought that was interesting, given that this author is typically a short story writer, and they’ve positioned this as his “debut novel” and entered it for a bunch of prizes … but I digress.) But while I really loved those two books, I liked — but just didn’t quite love — this one. Those books felt like albums with no skips, but this one didn’t. It had more chapters on the fringes of the “central plot,” less connected to everything else, and I was impatient with them.

That said, there were some chapters that made my jaw drop too (especially the one from which the novel gets its name), and while the ending felt like somewhat of a swerve, I also really liked it. There’s no doubt that Sequoia Nagamatsu has created something deeply resonant and human here, and I’ll happily read his next work.