Reading Room Radio: This Great Hemisphere

Dystopian SF brings Invisible Man to a massive scale. 

Title: This Great Hemisphere

Author: Mateo Askaripour

Reviewed by: Katelyn H. 

Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net

Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu 

Transcript

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Welcome to Harris County Public Library's Reading Room Radio, where your to-be red pile gets a little more exciting one micro podcast at a time. Hello everyone, it's Caitlin. One of the sure signs of a good book is how often you think about it long after you finished. There's not very many books like that that I've read that I actively think about months or years after I've read them. I read a book in March that I keep thinking about. And I think it is gonna be one of those for me that I that I continue to think about for the rest of my life, potentially. Funnily enough, one of the triggers that always makes me think about this book is McDonald's. Uh you're gonna have to read it to find out why. The book is called This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Asgorapor. I did not know very much about this book going into it. That's how I like to experience books, so I'm not gonna tell you much more than you can get from the very, very basic summary online. This is an adult novel, for sure, adult. Check out the content warnings for some mature content in there. But it's an adult science fiction, speculative, dystopian. Uh, it's definitely in conversation with invisible man that gets an epigraph right at the beginning. It's a primarily about a young woman who is invisible. That in this speculative society, some members of the population just randomly become invisible. And this is a genetic thing. Uh, it continues for the rest of their children that they they cannot be seen. And this invisibility has been exploited in the society, has created a caste system around that. So invisible people are are second-class citizens. It determines what kind of jobs they can have. There are all kinds of regulations about how they're supposed to move and live in society. So the main protagonist, sort of main protagonist, there's several actually, but the one we start out with is a young invisible woman. She's just landed an incredible career opportunity being an apprentice to an inventor, a very powerful politically involved inventor in this society. And he happens to not be invisible, so there's, you know, class difference there. It's unusual for him to be working so closely with invisible people. And so she's embarking on this new opportunity and is really excited about it. And everything kind of gets thrown into chaos when her brother, who she thought was dead, is the main suspect for a very high-profile political murder. And it kind of devolves from there. That's a that's actually a little bit more than I knew going into this book. What I knew was that it was going to be a dystopian and that it was by the same author of BlackBook. I haven't read Black Book, but I kind of saw it go around. It was really popular when it came out. That's a satirical novel that follows a black salesperson in like basically an all-white company. And my impression of that novel that it was like a very literary, satirical book. So I was expecting this great hemisphere to also be very like literary. It's a pretty long book. It's like over 400 pages. And so what surprised me is that it's not super literary. It's not, you know, obtuse. It's quite easy to read. It's packaged in in, it's basically a political thriller. Very easy to read. But at the same time, it does not spoon feed you as a reader. You do have to figure out things on your own just through context clues, like the slang that they use in the terminology. And that's my favorite type of world building, is when like you also have to work for it a little bit as a reader. I thought the rate of revelation was really strong in that way. There are multiple perspectives, kind of like I mentioned, it does get a little bit disorienting to keep all of the characters in your head. But it pays off because there is a huge twist ending. And this twist really did take me by surprise. This is the first book that I've read in a long time, where like when I finished, I immediately had to go back and read sections from before and try to figure out like, wait, there's no way, there's no way. So I went back and like read all of these sections, and yeah, it's really brilliantly, brilliantly written to keep that surprise until the very end. And then once you get over the initial surprise and shock, and like how, you know, think about it even more. It's like, why would he choose that? So yeah, really, really impactful. It's a book about oppression and resistance, how those things come in cycles, how when the present moment feels very heavy and scary, we can look to the past for help and hope. You know, it's a book about imperialism and colonialism, a lot of isms. But you know, there's a lot of meat there. But like, like I said, it's very highly readable, very compelling read, not difficult. It's just a little bit long. This is a book that I think more people should read. If you want to have a book that you keep thinking about when you eat McDonald's, check out this great hemisphere.