Mar 17

Mar 17 The Morningside

About the book

Author: Téa Obreht
Publisher: Random House

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
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 review.

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My Review

I loved The Tiger’s Wife, so I was very excited to pick up Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside. I’m also just a sucker for any literary fiction that promises hints of magic. And while I still think The Tiger’s Wife was Obreht’s masterpiece, I really enjoyed this one too.

The Morningside takes place in a near, post-apocalyptic future where US government incentivizes refugees from other countries to come and repopulate abandoned cities. Sil(via) and her mother arrive at (what I assume to be) a drowned, largely deserted New York City and move into The Morningside, a once-grand but dilapidated highrise where her aunt is superintendent. The most notable other resident is a mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse with three giant dogs that are only ever seen at night.

I loved the barely-there, is-it-magic integration of folktales into this story. We can’t help but turn the pages as Sil does her best to make sense of reality in between her mother’s fearful, tight-lipped silence about the past and her aunt’s happy, folktale-filled stories of their home.

I’m also not usually big on contemporary dystopian novels, but this was very well done. It takes a lot of skill to design a world like that and not make it the focal point, but Obreht is so good at creating vivid characters with intense relationships that the setting of this novel is allowed to be just that — a setting — and no more. And yet the questions of climate change, government corruption, and xenophobia are never far away.

This book’s marketing materials lean on the phrase, “There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t.” That’s a layered summary of this book’s major themes. I’m eager for more of my friends to read it so we can discuss!