#important reading

In the first few pages of this book, I felt jolted by the new translator—compared to the previous Han Kang books I’d read, the prose felt shortened, more abrupt—but by the time Kyungha arrived on Jeju, I was fully inside the world of the novel. Perhaps this wasn’t the product of the translation, but a deliberate move as Han Kang moved us from Seoul, from Kyungha’s depressed monotonous routine, to Jeju, swirling with threat and possibility, the oncoming storm mirroring the oncoming danger of remembrance, of sinking deep into and potentially drowning in the past? Even more than the genius of BTS (and this is saying something!), Han Kang’s writing makes me want to learn Korean, so I could read her writing in the original language.

Unpacking my own notes written into the beginning pages of this book risks submersion, again. Just like this novel seems to warn us, traveling into the past is fraught with risk. We might sink too deep and never return; it takes a strong hand, a bright light, to lead us back out again. The sea is one of the key metaphors Han Kang uses for this immersion into the past. The sea first appears in Kyungha’s reoccurring dream, detailed in the first pages of the novel: the sea rises and sweeps away the contents of the graves, surrounds the trees, forces the dreamer up onto the highest hill in the vicinity to avoid getting washed away. Writer Kyungha and visual artist Inseon team up to try to capture the dream; Kyungha asks her friend if she will help her bring the dream to life. For Kyungha and Inseon, the dream/art piece seems to resonate with different tragedies. Kyungha has written a successful book about the Gwangju Massacre (I thought, early on, that this was nonfiction and Kyungha was Han Kang herself—we know from Human Acts that the fourth wall break is possible), and the experience of researching this book and articulating the tragedy has sent Kyungha into an emotional tailspin. 

The dream resonates with Inseon because it connects to a different trauma: the emotional trauma she experienced raised by two people deeply scarred by the events on Jeju during WWII, immediately following, and the beginning of the Korean War. I needed to read the Wikipedia page to learn more about the Jeju Massacre of 1948, but details of Inseon’s parents lives piece together a narrative of this experience throughout the novel. Inseon, living alone on Jeju in the wake of her mother’s death, promptly begins work on the dream art piece. It’s chopping logs in her woodworking studio in the garage—for this very project, despite Kyungha later telling her she wants to call it off, that it wasn’t a broader dream, but simply a personal portrait of Kyungha’s dead-end life—that causes the instigating moment of this book. Inseon cuts off two of her fingers in the workshop and, hospitalized in Seoul, she calls Kyungha for help. 

Yet, the help Inseon needs is specific and strange: Kyungha must journey to her house on Jeju to save her white bird Ama before it’s too late. In the face of an oncoming storm, Kyungha’s literal journey to Jeju is also a literal (and metaphorical) expedition into and excavation of the past. The journey is one that Inseon can only ask of Kyungha, and, in many ways, it's more than she bargained for—a revealing of Inseon’s trauma and a reckoning with Kyungha’s isolation. As Inseon later insists, Kyungha—who has retreated into herself—is not, in fact, alone. “You have me,” Inseon (or the spirit manifestation, spirit-walking Inseon) insists, in one of the most hopeful moments in any Han Kang novel. Inseon, broken and bruised like Kyungha, still reaches out—severed fingers and all—to her best friend. Inseon insists on connection; she says of her dead bird Ami, “we haven’t parted ways, not yet.” And, with and for Kyungha, she immediately begins to work on the piece they call “We Do Not Part.” For Inseon, the past is unburied, visible, confronted. She holds on hard, both to this past and to her present. And, in the final moments of the novel, I had hope that Kyungha will reach out and find Inseon not there, as, in being not there, we know she’s alive in Seoul. Kyungha is different now; she took the matches with her into the snow. She didn’t let the candle burn out. In this, I see that she no longer wants to die. She has back the spark that keeps us living. 

The concrete and specific, in Han Kang’s hands, is simultaneously both real and symbolic. Inseon’s severed fingers reminded me, early on, of Han Kang’s capacity for this literary technique (have I ever seen this more masterfully done?), as Inseon must sit in the hospital, her fingers treated every three minutes by being stabbed with needles until blood flows. This brutal treatment, explained with Han Kang’s characteristic physical exactitude that leans to body horror, allows the fingers to survive. Without this, Inseon would lose the fingers, risking a phantom pain, a psychological haunting that—in the long term—would likely outweigh the short term suffering. What is this if not a metaphor for the ways we encounter and process grief? Do we have the strength to process? Or do we risk the long-term phantom pain, the residual haunting? The snowstorm (the haunting image of snow that doesn’t melt on the faces of the dead), the trees, the white birds, the sea—each of these take on metaphorical resonance while remaining real, physical, and immediate. 

I was particularly taken with the metaphor of the deep ocean, the sinking into the sea, putting me in mind of the Adrienne Rich lines: “First the air is blue and then / it is bluer and then green and then / black I am blacking out…” In the book’s third section, Inseon (spirit-walking version) guides Kyungha deep into the past, revealing her research into the covered up events of the Jeju Massacre in which citizens protested elections held in U.S/-occupied Korea and later battled back against military police installed to suppress protests. This section of the book more directly catalogs the parents’ experiences during these years, describing how Inseon’s mother tried to nurse her little sister to life by feeding her her own blood and how Inseon’s father searched for his baby sibling, even questioning the wife of a soldier who committed the slaughter on the beach, and how her mother visited the mine where thousands of bodies of the massacred were concealed for years, still hoping to find, in some way, her brother. Kyungha continues to wonder as each new piece of this tragedy unfolds: “Is this it? The brink of a gaping trench opening up below the abyssal plain, the very bottom of the deep sea where nothing emits light?” Or is there more still to come? More pain and suffering, more than it seems possible to conceive of, more cruelty, more loss, still to come? 

Like the ocean imagery, Inseon’s birds feel both literal and metaphorical. Like spirit-walking Inseon, they linger, casting their shadows on the walls, bridging the gap between life and death (why is life/death made out to be meaningful distinction, anyway? The dead remain with us). These birds, Inseon warns Kyungha, don’t show any sign of suffering until it’s too late. They seem fine until they keel over dead. They are sensitive to the world around them. They are another portrait of the way we might hold onto hardships, perhaps silent, perhaps invisible to others, until it’s too late. Yet, the birds are also real, individuals, lives that we grieve and cling to. As I read, I kept hoping that Kyungha would make it to the house in time to save Ama. But I should have known; it’s a Han Kang novel, after all. My retroactive reflection on the inevitability of this death still didn’t make it feel inevitable (inevitable only beyond the world of the book). In the book-world, couldn’t Kyungha have saved her? We do, from time to time, save others, including our pets. Until, eventually, inevitability, we don’t. Death happens. 

I bawled my eyes out at this midway point of the novel. The loss of Ama, the close call—what if Kyungha had been a bit earlier, could she have saved her?—struck the core of several of my losses. I grieved anew for the pets whose deaths felt to me (even if they weren’t, I keep telling myself) like some failure of my own. What if I had done this or that differently? Couldn’t I have saved her? The way Kyungha buried Ama, struggling to deal with the logistics of death, with a body, making choices about where and how to memorialize her, hurt me deeply, dragged up my losses. The loss of Ama, a bird, is not made small in the face of the catalog of loss that follows; it is, instead, part of this. The loss of the innocent and free thing, the loss of the thing you felt responsible for, the loss of the thing you struggled so hard to protect. Like Inseon’s severed fingers, this is another portrait of loss: the loss that hits you, in spite of it all, the grief that bleeds afresh when the wound is reopened. 

“We Do Not Part” is dissected as a title when Kyungha and Inseon name their joint art project this. Kyungha wonders whether about the meaning: “As in we refuse to part by refusing to say goodbye, or as in we actually don’t part ways?” “Is it somehow incomplete, the parting?” “Is it deferred? The goodbye—or the closure? Indefinitely?” In an additional reading of the title, I noticed throughout the book how often lips are described as parting or not parting. “We Do Not Part”…could this, too, refer to the lips that do not part, that remain tightly sealed, the possible speaker silent? Is the past too often silent, as well as those who recall it? What does it take to speak up and out? What does it take to part and, in parting, reveal the truth? 

I read this book, strangely and fittingly, in the midsts of an interdisciplinary, collaborative unit on the Holocaust. As I taught my students about this genocide, as we talked about memoirs and memorials, as they read the words of Elie Wiesel, Pierre Seel, and Alfons Heck (three young boys all capturing the Holocaust from different angles, each speaking truth, each revealing the complexities of this tragedy, making our “knowing” of it the more multifaceted for reading more memories), I kept coming back to Han Kang. She understands the risks and realities of memoir, of speaking—there are always stakes both for speaking and silence—of revisiting, of living in the present which is inseparable (we do not part) from the past. When we took our students to the Jewish Heritage Museum, the grandson of the Holocaust survivors that we met with explained that his grandfather told the details of his experiences and his grandmother remained silent. These are both responses to tragedy, to the impossibility of these experiences, to confronting the reality of humans’ capacity for both cruelty and survival. How do we end up speaking or holding silence, the only options available to us? Pierre Seel said that, many times, he regretted speaking about his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel devoted his life to telling. 

Inseon’s documentary process, which captures the stories of women who persisted through tragedies, who reveal these realities when they no longer hold their silences, mirrors something in Han Kang’s own creative process. Inseon had created a triptych: the first film about the Vietnam War, the second film about a woman in Manchuria fleeing Japanese soldiers and losing her toes to frostbite, and the third film Inseon’s own memoir. Unlike the hard-hitting realism of the first two, the third film is strange, abstract, dream-like. The tragedy is not confronted head on, but alluded to, cataloged through its impacts and not its particulars. The shadow of the tree on the wall of Inseon’s garage is the focus and not Inseon herself, not her memories of her father (suffering from PTSD) making his daughter hide for hours in the caves from a threat existing only in his own mind. The description of the first film, of the jungle rain, and the women rushing to rescue the chickens from drowning, is some of the most gorgeous writing I have ever read. The swirling water—the torrential rain, the snow, the rising sea tide—connects all these tragedies, brings them together into an amalgamation of loss. 

The Serviceberry’s short and profound narrative distills Kimmerer’s broader framework into a focused and compelling argument for a gift economy. We can, she argues, shift away from the Capitalist system which defines and controls our thinking, our value systems, and our behavior. Introducing a gift economy—even within or alongside Capitalism—offers us new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationships to the land and to each other, Kimmerer explains. In a gift economy, we fundamentally understand the resources we use as gifts rather than as our property to covet, to amass, to hoard. This mindset shift naturally leads to a shift in our behavior: we see the world in terms of reciprocity, rather than transaction. Inspired by the gifts of others—the gift of ripe berries from the bush, freshly laid eggs from the chickens, biscuits dropped off by a neighbor—we want to meet this spirit of gifting with gifts of our own. We offer our resources, in turn. Our resources might be food, or those of time, care, money, or possessions. 

In one of my favorite examples from the book, Kimmerer tells the story of an indigenous hunter-gather in the Brazilian rainforest who has brought down a large animal. He summons his neighbors to a feast. When asked by an anthropologist why he didn’t dry and salt the meat, storing it for himself, the confused hunter responses, “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.” This simple phrase cuts to the heart of the distinction between a gift economy and Capitalism. When one has excess, one invests this resource into others, into the community, into the things that are held in common. This is, in a very different sense than the Capitalist term, also investment. Building our community and caring for others means we have strong relationships—and others will, in turn, share generously with us. The next day, someone else with excess will share what they have because it’s more than they need. The gift economy also understands excess and “what is enough.” Some of us, living under Capitalism, might understand this, but we invest in our own future or we save for “a rainy day.” Is there any guarantee of enough if we are on our own in trying to secure it? What about if we pour our excess outward as gifts? Close friendships, supportive communities, resources held in common and for the good of all—these are the true security. Nothing will ever feel like enough (and we have plenty of evidence of this under Capitalism) unless we can shift our understanding and see “security” and “excess” for what these truly are. 

A key success of this book for me was Kimmerer’s ability to articulate the value of small, incremental change. So often, focusing on the evils of Capitalism overwhelms me. It’s hard to see our way out of such a perversive system that seemingly suffuses everything we know, use, and take part in. However, Kimmerer shows us how many gift economies we already have and support—from public library systems to the Little Free Libraries, from social media creators who share their expertise to free-cycling programs in neighborhoods and on college campuses, from local farm stands to generous neighbors in every community—humans understand how to give gifts, and we’re drawn to do this instinctively and our of immense care for each other. It’s easy to see humans as inherently selfish, inherently competitive. But this is also the fear-driven outlook that Capitalism gives us. Kimmerer explains how Capitalism relies on scarcity; systematically, it creates the illusion of scarcity where it doesn’t actually exist (although, Kimmerer points out, through the gluttony of Capitalism we’re swiftly arriving at a place of true natural scarcity from which there may be no return). Facing scarcity in a Capitalist system, we see the risk of becoming one “without.” We hold on tightly and fearfully to what we have. Living inside a gift economy influences our mindset in the exact opposite way: inspired by the generosity of others, we see what we have as enough and then some. Even reading through Kimmerer’s examples of gift economies, and recognizing how many exist in my daily life, moved me. Looking at those examples, I wanted to participate more fully. I want to give back. 

A gift economy can co-exist with Capitalism (it already does) and we can expand it. We can start new gift economies that thrive in small communities. Kimmerer uses the example of Scandinavian countries sometimes labeled “cuddly Capitalism,” pointing out that these communities simply hold a greater number of resources in common than we see in America’s “cutthroat Capitalism)—free healthcare and education, for example, are the investments of the whole, where everyone’s resources are supported by everyone collectively. These countries are still Capitalist, but they privatize fewer resources. Perhaps the smaller size of these countries, with a stronger sense of community, makes these aspects of a gift economy easier to achieve? Kimmerer does highlight how pure gift economies can and do function both today and historically in small, tightly-knit communities. In shifting toward shared resources and investment in our communities, we change ourselves in the process. Yes, this economic shift is morally better for our planet’s sustainability, for achieving an equal distribution of human resources, but it’s also actively impacting us for the better. We should opt in to gift economies for a number of reasons and one key one is that, within the gift economy, we flourish. We feel secure, connected, and safe. We achieve the deeply meaningful bonds that are the true thing human beings seek. 

The prose gripped me immediately; goofy, dense, sharply observed. The first short story launches us into the mind and lived experience of a young Black man cosplaying as Tamaki Suoh, heading into the LA Convention Center. The voice—self-effacing, self-congratulatory, populated with nerd cultural refeprences—was so perfectly, humorously Riley. Pages later, Riley was dead. His death is told through the point of view of a local artist, Kevan, who saw the grainy cellphone footage of the police altercation outside the convention center. The quietness of this death, the “one more tragedy on social media” way that it creeps into this story, undercuts the humor, forcing a new kind of absurdity on the reader—the absurdity that death can and does just happen like this, the absurdity of young Black men struck down over and over again in America and nothing changes, nothing changes. 

The George Saunders quote on the front of my copy of the book is fitting: “Vivid, fast, way-smart, and verbally inventive.” I can see the parallel between George Saunders’s work and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s use of irony, overstatement, biting commentary on what is most stupidest and selfish in our communities and in our human natures. Like Saunders, Thompson-Spires’s caustic wit calls out individuals who are hypocritical and yet writes from a position of tremendous empathy for the systematically oppressed. I enjoy irony, and the many places of humor in this book, yet my sister wasn’t as much of a fan in our family book club discussion. She cited the places where real violence happens, from the death of the Facebook-addicted Jilly to the harm done to the child growing up with her cult-included (currently Fruitarian) mother. Both these examples existed for me in an absurd framework. Jilly’s death—after she has repeatedly contemplated committing suicide for attention—is an ironic fulfillment of what she thought that she wanted. Fruitarian Lisbeth is constantly undercut in her efforts by her husband Ryan who takes their daughter Inedia to Walmart and Mcdonald’s during the story. Lisbeth is a poignant commentary on reality TV, what makes it onto reality TV, the carcrash-like horrors of a human being’s choices…what makes other humans so fascinated with the horrifying? The extreme? The heart of this story is social commentary, but it felt to me like a key part of this commentary was the reader reacting with exasperated laughter to both these women’s circumstances. There is something deeply relatable about them both. But, irony can also seem unkind. This is the challenge of irony and it will land differently for different readers. Do we position ourselves close to Jilly and Lisbeth? See in their antics the echoes of ourselves? Or do we position ourselves distantly and hold judgment…or pity? Do we stand both close and far at the same time, both pitying and confused about the moments of dark humor in these stories? Irony is a tricky genre. 

Strikingly, the first and final stories were the places where real pain took me fully out of the framework of absurdity and humor. The deaths of Riley and Brother Man knocked the wind out of me. And the final short story, “Wash Clean the Bones,” operates in a tonally different register than the rest of the book. The story of Alma, a wedding singer struggling with depression as she sings over and over at the funerals of young Black boys, arrives at such a point of despair about the mentally overlapping loss of her brother and the birth of her son that she comes terrifyingly close to ending her son’s life. What is the point, her story cries, if this is the world in which her young Black son will grow up? This affirmation at the end of this collection that all Alma can do is keep living, keep doing the thing immediately in front of her, is a point of gravitas and depth reached through direct narration. More often, this collection achieves introspection and commentary through situational humor, through levity that exposes the dark underbelly of exploitation, power dynamics, gender dynamics, and the bizarre distortions Capitalism works on all our brains. 

Many of the stories in this collection center the lives of affluent, upper-middle class Black Americans. I found this really rewarding and important to read. Have I read fiction before that deals with that particular lived experience? So often, Black literature in America has centered—both through the choices of authors and the publishing industry—on tragedy and poverty. Instead, in these stories, girls struggle with being one of two black kids in their grade at their private school or in their hot yoga class at the gym. Fatima navigates having a white boy from her prep school and staying friends with Violet, an albino Black girl who attends public school and is infused in Black culture in a way that is foreign to Fatima. Fatima studies Black culture with her teacher Violet, learning to affect expressions and fashions that were not intuitive to her. She chooses to keep her world separate, for as long as she possibly can, sensing the impossibility of reconciling her two worlds. Thompson-Spires comments on the feelings of “Black exceptionalism,” the harms of tokenism, and the ways minorities are often pitted against each in white-dominanted spaces. Characteristically, she uses humor to do this. One of the most memorable stories in this collection is an epistolary tale told through notes two Black mothers keep exchanging stuffed into their children’s backpacks. Despite, or because of, being the only Black girls in their grade at their fancy private school, the daughters, Christina and Fatima, despise each other. And, by extension, their mothers’ conflict escalates. These two highly-educated women, who sign off their letters with their credentials (one a therapist, one a college professor), are at each others’ throats until—in facing the white education institution that connects them—they find themselves united at the end, seemingly bonding deeply once they meet each other in person. This pivot is funny, fun, and light, but it reveals the foundational challenges beneath it, the frustrations of highly-segregated educational spaces that are still spaced by the long legacies of inequality in America: Jim Crow laws, redlining, and busing routes and policies. 

The liveliness of this collection of stories will stay with me. The range of characters will hang around in my brain for a very long time. I’ll think of the complexity of Raina, navigating her enjoyment with her online popularity as an ASMR artist and her confusion at the sexualization she experiences in this space. In brilliant fashion, this short story reveals how a young woman making online content, particularly a young Black woman, cannot escape the male gaze that objectifies her. At the same time, this kind of attention can be thrilling. Without fully understanding it, Raina plays into this at times, leaving cuts in the videos that show off her cleavage. She does this while also deeply fearing the bullying of a boy at her school, Kevin, and his friends. She senses the real threat these white boys pose to her bodily safety and security. Yet, she doesn’t seem to sense the threat of her “older” boyfriend Dom who lives across the country and who found her through these videos. Her primary target, in the moments she chooses to display her body in the videos, is her own mother, and the reaction she knows she will get from a mother who tries to police her behavior. Of course her mother is right to be afraid for her daughter. Yet, in the way of many teachers, Raina wants to push at a boundary she senses. Her mother Carmen shuts her down, scolds her, and doesn’t explain things to her. It’s so, so hard to be a parent of a teen. Raina’s seemingly simple and innocuous videos become a spider web of complexity, allowing this story to point out the overlapping regions of sexism, racism, teenage self-exploration, agency, developing sense of self, parenting, and how online media only heightens and charges all these existing tensions. 

The structure of this collection cleverly interweaves these narratives; frequently, the protagonist of a particular story appeared as a side character in the previous story. This waterfall effect adds layers and textures: Violet’s teenage boyfriend Mike grew up into the gay reality TV show producer in Lisbeth’s tale, while the mothers Lucinda and Monica become friends, Fatima is still processing the harm of Christina’s bullying decades later. Marjorie’s story will also stay with me. This was one of the stories on the more serious end of the spectrum, for me. While there are moments of humor and levity here, Marjorie’s story is primarily an empathetic insight into the mind of a woman struggling with anger management, stress, depression, and anxiety. She clearly desires connection with others, yet she also repeatedly does the very things that sabotage connection and push other people away: she sleeps with her foster sister’s husband for years, she recognizes her friend Jessica pulling away because of her negativity yet can’t seem to stop her flow of negative words and emotions. The arc of this story is sad, as we see her finally give into her anger and frustration in an outburst at the DMV (of course it’s at the DMV! Who among us hasn’t been at our worst at the DMV? Which is a layer of humor here). There is also hope here. We see Marjorie in therapy working with a woman who clearly does not judge her. We see that, while she has lost her connection with her foster sister, she has also ended her relationship with a man who she was entrenched with for years as a mistress. 

There are several parts, especially early on in the novel where I laughed aloud because of the comedic Overstatement of marches narration March seem to have an eye to some of the small domestic absurdities of the world, some of the quirks of human character that make humans, charming and memorable and strange and funny. He has a different kind of panache of the narrator, especially in his early days where he walks the south as a peddlers so small, Where, even though he is more morally righteous than his colleagues in this field, he is able to mass a small success financially and return home to conquer a community bursting at the scene with intellectual exam and life. The setting of Concord, Massachusetts was one of the most compelling for me and the novel I was fascinated by the way, which real historical figures like Emerson and throw left off the page Throw, especially vivid as he wandered before us and Pavel on the pond which he made famous and made him famous in term. The young passionate love story between March and mommy burst to life against this backdrop. March is compelled by army passion and high ideal yet wronged by her temper, her ability to be her mind her propensity to be her mind, and he sees to tame his temper, pursued her toward more mature and feminine conduct this dynamic between them, frustratingly sexist for a modern reader yet seemingly time. Appropriate to expect that it will be unable to put her family life before her ideal and yet we know from the source tax that is the father who goes to serve in the civil war, and interestingly, this become an experience in which he cannot let go of that activity, tortured by the idea of returning his family before he has in someway settled his own ledger.

Fascinatingly this struggle for March become not about the good he has done in the world, the high ideals with which she sets off to work as a chaplain to serve the young boys from his community, but about the wrong he has done in the world and the fact that he needs to continue to serve and alleviate his guilt. This guilt takes over his commitment to his family slowly pulling him further away from them as in his letters he cannot find a way to put a words what he has experience in war at first these experiences are those in life and death scenarios in which he has made a choice for his own survival and he wishes to spare money Both that unflattering portrait of himself and some details of the union soldiers barely hanging on in the early here at the war, yet this guilt road as an actions take on NEW for more specific to life March lead he is reunited with a girl he loved before he ever met mommy as a young Pedaler in the south, where he felt for a black woman and enslaved in the household of blah blah. Their deep emotional connection pull them back into each other‘s arms, although bodily transgression occurred clear that March feels a confusing mixture of responsibility, love and idealization of the black experience which blah blah blah later comment on army showing that from her perspective the thing that Mer loves is a version of her experience of a black woman Who is in many ways who educated in tempered along white ideal, raised in the household of her biologically, white father.

Part of the way through the book at the part where blah blah blah, there is a sudden point of view shift the point of view shifts to Marmie‘s first person narration which shocked me in real time as I read because I had so deeply internalized, marches voice and his perspective on the relationship he has with his wife. To suddenly see this from the opposite point of view to understand better the experience for army to see the moments where the wool was lifted from her eyes and she understood that there was so much her husband had been keeping from her about the experiences that he was going through in war Was an impactful narrative decision. Both this moment of transition and the choice of where and how to end the book will stay with me as brilliant narrative moves. I thought that it was interesting that in Marmie‘s point of view, a significant aspect of her arc was Her horror at the realization that her husband was in love with whatever her name is, and then subsequent processing of the fact that this made sense in the context of a man going through the experience as he was going through, and that’s the real transgression.

The real gap between them was not this so much as His silence and how little she was given access to of what was going on with him. Yet faced with the experience of riding home to her daughters she sees how that silence could potentially be an act of love of hoping to spare her from some of the details of his world. Interestingly, it is within finding out these pieces of information that mommy is experiencing More of the brutal realities of war, living in DC seeing the industries of war from steel to prostitution that clamor and pack into the streets of DC attempting to find housing and then living in shared boarding housing in DC while waiting on her husband‘s recovery exposes army to layers of the world beyond the Haven of Concord Conquered becomes synonymous with the community and family on a smaller scale that the marches have drove to build through their value system there are small ways in which the world invades the novel in conquered the most notable and memorable being when that protects one of the enslaved people fleeing on the underground railroad who is hiding in the marches home The marches following Marie‘s idealism participate in the underground railroad, which is something Marie and her brother work on before she ever meets Mr. March. One particular young girl, heading to Canada bonds deeply with Beth, only a few years older than her yet with child herself on this perilous journey, quiet mild mannered bath is alone at home when the constable/sheriff shows up seeking this girl and Beth stands up to him and asked to see his search warrant purity and goodness of heart is held up as a gold standard by Joe in the original novel yet I was interested in the ways in which purity or idealism is held up by Mr. March and by army in this Reimagining best purity seems true yet there is a purity.

We also project onto others and burden them with which is what blah blah blah clearly feels that Mr. March has done to her late in the novel she confesses the truth of her own guilt that she carries with her making it clear that the accidental death of her half brother and white enslaver Who her biological father intended her to be his subservient play thing and was already the victim of his incestuous rape, his accidental death was only partial accidental and she rejoiced in this death. She carries with her very complex feelings about her father who she cares for until his dying day, staying by his side, despite opportunities to flee as the front lines of the civil war arrive at their doorno one she tries to show March with perhaps the exception of a child forever immortalized by a too early death is free from forms of guilt and moral ambiguity. The circumstances of the world such that you live in it is to be Exposed to the violences of the world, no one is free entirely from moral gray zone yet March clemency that he feels for her choices is more than he would grant himself yet she points out how this also is a type of infantilization of her, insisting in his mind on an ideal of her rather than the real person that she is

Consistently throughout the novel March has complex robust relationships with black characters that explore the nuances of where and how he sees them both as specific individuals and as symbols of their own racial group and the liberation and social change toward which he works as an educator, he is both remarkably Caring for children and open to the brilliance and capacity of young black children yet also insistently commenting on them as young black children who desire education, seeing them comparatively or as a group to their white peers. It is so poignant to see someone attempt to think beyond the framework of their world to succeed in certain ways to fall, obviously short in others

The afterword talks about the real historical Bronson Alcott, Louisiana Alcott, real father, on whom Mr. March the original and Geraldine Brooks version is based it is clear and the descriptions of this man that he was a creative invader and tried many projects some with lasting impact and others with short term flash in the pan Flare. My personal favorite is that Bronson Alcott is credited with the invention personally invented recess. I think I could die happy. He also took up such notions as starting a utopian vegan colony called Fruitlands, which failed in its first year when the members were unwilling to kill the worms that got into their store of apples sometimes it is our own adherence to her high ideals that get in our own a character trait that seems profoundly explored through the fictionalized twice over Mr. March, Mr. March by the end of the book seems to come to a place where he feels he is only worthy of the projected innocence and perfection of his family If he himself can tone, his ultimately heaviest on his mind is his fearful power is when blah blah blah workshare cotton farm is attacked in the night by local confederate sympathizers running as a ragged rebel band prepared for this possibility. March takes cover in his hideout, not stirring from this wow the aged blah blah blah blah his shot and killed and The remaining enslaved workers young and all taken captive already tormented by his guilt. March mix to follow them what he imagines he could do he has no idea contracted sharply to March. In this moment is Jesse the young charismatic, strong, black man who leads the workers cotton farm Jesse is a man action and unlike March he hold his sharp composure to play out his best chance of success. He slips into the moonshine and patiently as the rubles fall, intoxicated hands, March a gun taken from one of the men, but March hands it back even in this high-stakes scenario, even knowing what these men have done March is not able or prepared to kill yet there are situations in which Through his spontaneous scrambling for survival he has let men die. Perhaps it is this the animal instinct part of him that March most the tests in himself it seems that he leaps when he should stay still and stay still when he should leap. This is not something that feels easy to blame in the horrors through which he exists yet it on the flipside feels easy to idolize a man like chassis who’s so clearly moves through the world according to his conviction by the end, March seems strangely childlike buffeted more by the winds of faith and by his agency, even in his return to his family this is not his choice so much as it is blah blah blah in assistance in the book ends with the scene.

Rambo, Nurse Ratched, and Vic’s banter is the lively through-line of this novel. No matter how dark their fortunes get, Rambo and Nurse Ratched are a comedic duo, who consistently draw Vic out of his worries and out of his own head. In turn, he loves them fiercely, in a way they seem capable of returning. Rambo is bumbling and earnest. He’s easy to fool because he seems to take everything in with a child-like naivety and enthusiasm. Nurse Ratched easily plays the sarcastic straight man to Rambo’s antics. Her sense of humor is witty and dark, full of jokes about death, violence, and imparting physical harm—ironic for a medical robot. I particularly enjoyed Nurse Ratched’s ability to create humor through the pairing of her spoken words and the text/images appearing on her screen; she would often use these two simultaneous modes of communication to create a humorous contrast. The dialogue between Rambo and Nurse Ratched is one of the genuine and immersive joys of this novel, which quickly transports the reader into the world of these goofy, near-human characters. 

While the early section of the book establishes backstory (the finding and reviving of Hap, who was once a murderous robot in the employ of the government, and the life of jazz music-loving, classic-movie-watching robot Gio before he “had” his human son Victor), the central plot of the book kicks into gear when The Authority discover their tree-top laboratory and home and arrive in their ship The Terrible Dogfish to take Gio away. Gio was once an inventor employed by The Authority and his dark role in wiping out humanity and allowing for robot supremacy later becomes clear—he was the one who invented the HARPs (Human Annihilation Response Protocol) and he knew Hap in their lives before. But Gio came to see the error of his ways and fled the City of Electric Dreams with the help of a mysterious figure who later appears in the story, The Blue Fairy. The lives that Gio and Hap previously led, and their active choice to let go of the cruelty that once ruled their actions and their views, make redemption a central theme of this novel: where and how do we believe in redemption—for others, but primarily (and most difficultly) for ourselves? Vic believes unfailingly in the goodness of both his father Gio and the boy Hap who he grows to love. It is clear that Vic’s faith is key in both these characters’ ability to grow beyond their dark pasts, to forgive themselves, to choose lives of beauty and kindness. 

It is Vic’s belief in Gio that sends the other four—Vic, Rambo, Nurse Ratched, and Hap—on a quest to rescue him from the robots who took him back, wiped his memories/programming, and set him back on this previous path as inventor for The Authority. This journey expands Vic’s thinking, determination, and sense of self. All the characters must encounter things beyond their comfort zones. Vic and Hap seem to grow as “people” through these experiences, while Rambo and Nurse Ratched remain their lovable, yet consistent selves. Is this difference the regular literary one of main character verses supporting cast? Or is it due to the difference of the human heart that beats in Vic’s chest, echoed by the “more than robot” heart blooming in Hap? 

It’s interesting to me that the emotional breadth of these characters parallels humanity/robot distinctions with protagonist/foil distinctions…Perhaps this was an intuitive choice, perhaps the very reason the human Vic takes center stage? (Although I read back-to-back with this book Klara and The Sun where, inversely, the one robot surrounded by an array of humans is the novel’s First Person narrator. It’s worth holding these books up as mirrors of each other.) While Rambo and Nurse Ratched don’t showcase the same character growth as Vic and Hap, it is clear that all robots in this novel are capable of transcending the limits we might assume of their robotic natures when they experience a world that challenges, expands, and changes them. Love changes them. The opportunity to think for themselves blooms greater abilities. A drop of Vic’s human blood makes them forever “human-like” in the way they are moved by the beauty of nature, the passage of time, the expression of affection. Hap falls in love with the sight of a delicate butterfly, and this gentleness grounds the once purely-destructive boy. Hap falls in love with Vic and this love drives his protectiveness, loyalty, and determination to re-learn himself (after he sacrifices his memories/programming to wipe The Authority’s server) at the end of the novel. 

Vic’s love for Hap changes him, as well. Vic, it becomes clear, is the last human remaining on earth—a truth Vic and Gio both never really wanted to confront, hoping against hope that some other humans will reveal themselves, tucked away in some secret corner of the earth. But Gio’s HARPs were too successful, too thorough, too deadly. Vic, interestingly for the last human left alive, is asexual. The robots seems to understand sex in clinical terms—they speak about it and joke about it—and Nurse Ratched in particularly seems inclined to trying it out. These jokes and conversations make Vic uncomfortable, and his friends comment openly and without shame on his lack of sexual arousal or interest in sex. While Vic does not experience sexual attraction, he develops romantic feelings for Hap. This is clearly his first experience with feeling this way and he works through these feelings in fits and starts, trying to parse where friendship ends and where whatever this other thing he feels for Hap begins. 

Vic’s reckoning with his feelings occurs in tandem with Hap’s growing feelings. It’s clear from the beginning that Hap looks at Vic differently…and he looks, and looks, and looks, fixated on Vic and trying to understand him. Perhaps this early fixation reveals Hap’s original programming to obsessively find all humans? Perhaps it reveals the impact of Vic’s blood droplet fueling his heart? Perhaps it is love at first sight, reborn Hap hooked on a strange wilderness boy who loves his friends and his father fiercely and with open devotion? As these two stutter-step toward each other, both are clearly giving more emotionally and being more to another than they have ever been before to another being and their innocence is paired with poignant maturity, deeply-felt awareness of themselves. Vic knows himself; he knows how he feels and these truth are simple and fundamental inside of him. Hap’s arrival shakes up these things, but in a way that feels very true to, and honors, Vic’s sexuality. 

The dynamic group’s journey to rescue Gio takes them into the pathway of several other strange figures. Traveling along the road, they’re taken prisoner by the Coachman, an eccentric robot who collects artifacts of humanity. Like a ringmaster displaying his collection, the Coachman markets the remnants of humanity to robots curious about other beings. He takes Vic and crew through The Land of Toys to exhibit them, holding them prisoner in display cages, but once he learns that Victor is the last of those humans, which he adores and romanticizes, he decides to help them. The Coachman takes them as far as The City of Electric Dreams and strategizes a plan to sneak our heroes into the city concealed within shipping crates. He also tells them of The Blue Fairy and their residence/business Heaven, a keystone location of robot resistance to the uniform control of the Authority. Robots who have broken away from the Authority for any reason, claiming independence like Gio once did, flock to The Blue Fairy. They were the reason Gio was able to escape the city and flee to the remote woods, and, it’s ultimately revealed, the reason Gio ended up having and raising Vic.

The Blue Fairy is not a sympathetic figure, but they are a powerful one and the crew’s night spent in Heaven, a love motel, is strange and fraught. As part of their bargain with and testing of Vic’s team, the Blue Fairy extracts Hap’s repressed memories of the harm he did as a HARP, seeking out and killing remaining humans. The Blue Fairy also challenges the initial origin story of Victor—that his parents died and Gio raised him — revealing that they had been secretly keeping a human embryo, which they entrusted to Gio to create life from this source, which then grew into the human boy Victor. By the end of the novel, Victor’s human characteristic most essential is his persistent hope. In spite of Hap’s reset on top of Gio’s, Victor rebuilds his life and the interpersonal connections which form the cornerstones of his sense of self, his emotional core: his abiding love for his family and friends.