✨✨
Hummingbird Salamander
Jeff VanderMeer
351 pages
Published April 6th, 2021 by MCD
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I spent much of this book pondering “What is going on?” or “Am I really dumb for not understanding what’s happening right now?” and “What is the actual point of this story?”.
I’m done with the book and I’m soooo tired! I was playing mental gymnastics trying to keep all the threads together and making sense. I still don’t even think I really understood the entire plot.
I will say that the writing, at times, was very beautiful. The story was lyrical and at times I would stop to reread a sentence or passage just to take it in and think about it a moment. That’s a rarity for me. At other times, I found it completely sexist and perhaps misogynistic (a 6ft tall woman weighing 230 lbs is NOT far-fetched and does not mean she has to lumber around as if she’s a giant troll).
The Hummingbird taxidermy was interesting at the beginning, an intriguing mystery that Jane needs to solve. What does it mean? Why did she receive it? What is she supposed to do with it? These are the questions I thought the story was about and would eventually answer. But the story drifted so much. Jane becomes part spy/detective/victim/assailant/….. on and on. The character development was so fast that all I kept thinking was, how would one average person adapt to so many different situations like this. As well, the likability of the Jane seemingly declined with every page. Her family is constantly put on the back burner so she can solve this mystery. Why? She gives up everything to follow the steps of a dead person. Why can’t she just live her life?
The story gives you glimpses of the future world Jane lives in. Environmental climate change has wreaked havoc on the earth, we have poisoned our land and water, food is different and plagues run amuck. But this is only vaguely touched on in the book. I thought this was the main point of the mystery she is supposed to solve. But it is only ever mentioned in passing. And it appears that everyone just lives and works and goes about their daily lives while the world is literally falling to pieces. I would think in that drastic of an environmental change, we wouldn’t be living our normal daily lives anymore. That was really strange.
Then the ending. If I understood the ending, then nothing happens. Or I misunderstood the ending. I don’t know? There were so many tangents that didn’t go anywhere. So many assumptions made by Jane that took her to the next step but the assumptions made no sense.
I’m very frustrated to have put all this time into this book only to walk away with little understanding of what the purpose of the story was. I didn’t learn anything. I didn’t get any lesson from it. I don’t know why the character worked so hard to get to the end and then … that ending? I’m still shaking my head.
Thank you to #MCD and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.
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