TW: Pedophilia, descriptions of violence, description of an epileptic attack, racism

I received a copy of this novel from Skyhorse Publishing through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to them and to the author for the opportunity to review this novel.

After reading the summary, I realized that I haven't read a book like this one before. It felt like a short story collection and an anthology, but if every story was intricately tied together. I was curious about whether I'd like the style and the cover gave me such a haunting feeling.

What I Liked

I did end up really liking the style! It almost felt like one of those ensemble cast movies, where each character is reacting to the plot in different ways and some never even end up interacting with each other. The writing is filled with short sentences that make reading really easy and quick. You'd fly through the pages. In some ways, it was also pretty poetic and very in-your-face about how much damage humans can do to the environment. I think it did a good job showcasing the effects of climate change/global warming without being overt about it. I also liked some of the characters; their personal issues and their interactions with their environment could be pretty compelling. I think the doctor and his wife were probably my favourites to follow.

What I Didn't Like

Despite the fast-paced writing, the plot is so very slow, which was why it took me so long to get through this novel. The women weren't entirely written well, either; one of them was a sexual predator which was incredibly uncomfortable to read about. When the novel very briefly touched on racism, I didn't find it was handled well at all.

Conclusion

There was some good aspects to this book, but nothing about it blew me away.

My Rating: 2.5/5

Above the Ether takes place the day after tomorrow, or so it seems. An earthquake in the gulf at the same time as a hurricane creates an epic wave that devours the gulf coast. Never-ending fires render communities unlivable. Drought devastates farmland. Dandelions and mollusks and nature in general seems to have run amok. Eric Barnes describes a dystopic future that is only a tick of the clock from our present, a future where the climate catastrophe we have done little to avoid arrives. And yet, Barnes does not use the word climate once. This is not a polemic, this is a story.

Above the Ether follows six narratives, a father and his kids fleeing the gulf, a husband and wife seeking their runaway son, a callous investor checking out the potential for disaster dividends, refugees finally getting their release from a border detention facility, carnival workers working their route, and a restaurant manager just doing his job as best he can. These disparate people move by happenstance and necessity toward an unnamed city where they converge in a crisis, finding hope in the midst of despair.

Nothing and no one has a name. People are described solely by the roles. Every location is unnamed, leaving it to us to situate it in our own cultural geography. So why is it so compelling? Why did I read this in one sitting, skipping dinner and reading to the end? I think we value what we work for.



I remember being taught to put a notecard over the bottom third of the text while I was studying, covering the serifs that make reading easier. My professor explained that if I was forced to engage and infer while I was reading, I would remember what I studied better. He also said in the end, I would learn to read faster. He was right. There is this idea in pedagogy that instilling a “desirable difficulty” in the work makes it easier to remember. The concept of desirable difficulty might not be related to writing, but I think it captures the magic of Above the Ether.

It is as though Barnes took the writing advice of “show, don’t tell” to its ultimate expression. He won’t even tell us who is who and in some chapter fragments, it can be hard to tell. But that effort makes us more engaged. So much is unexplained, we must bring ourselves into the reading process. We cannot just sit back and read. We have to think while we read.

We care about these people because we have worked to know them and their situation. We understand the catastrophe because we had to integrate our own experience. Add to that, the prose that is as simple as a hymn and as musical. There is poetry on these pages as well as great understanding of humanity and compassion for the human condition.

Above the Ether is painful in many ways, especially since this dystopia seems inevitable given our desire to consume the inheritance of the next seven generations all in one. It feels grounded in the reality of likely outcomes and human potential.

Above the Ether will be released June 11th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

this is a non-formatted book that jumps from part of one story to another while there is no connection until the end of the story (if then). this is a world that has been destroyed by the deterioration of 'the city' because of the lack of jobs and the loss of production. more and more repairs public works were delayed as the roads, bridges,levees and canals began falling apart.

Barnes inflicts his people with some bizarre ecological disasters, such as when one city is swallowed up by dandelions. but after reading how many of the characters came to be on the road, they are all stuck on a highway that is below sea level. When they are caught in a heavy rain, there is a massive
pile-up on the sub-surface road, when the local levee collapses, the road becomes a river rising to sixth feet in depth.

people from the north side of the city, come to the aide of those from the south side who were stuck in the flooded highway. the story is incomprehensible at some points, or so convoluted that I can't understand why you would spend time figuring it out. Read something else.

Authors need to snare their reeders quickly or they are lost. I hate the word dystopian but that fits this work exactly. I could not get into this book because of its seemingly disjointed characters. I did not know where this was going and the author did not keep me interested enough to find out.

This was OK. Much of it is in third person. The author obviously has talent and imagination. The story unfolded slowly and I was lost in the beginning more than I thought was necessary. I'm sure some reader will connect this more than I. 3.5 stars.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

I couldn't get into this one. usually I love dystopian setting and though in this novel I found some interesting idea, the nameless characters bothered me. I don't think that people need to have names to be interesting, but here were a bunch about of 6 people and no one of them was called anything but the father, the investor, husband or wife. It put me off a little from the start. Later it wasn't better. And again, I normally like short sections in book but here there were too short.

No, I didn't like this book.

I enjoy dystopian genre, all these different ways to end the world as we know it. Climate is one way to go. Popular enough to command its own subgenre, climate related science fiction can be very compelling, possibly because it’s so tragically realistic. In this book the global warming is very real and it is devastating. Wild fires, raising waters (albeit not in a geographical proximity that would have been a practical solution to both), tsunamis, earthquakes, storms and so on. There is a city (nameless as all things are in this book) that is separated into a distinct North and South end, one inhabitable, one abandoned. But people survive…like they tend to. And it is their journeys through this scarred new world that comprise this novel. The book is made up of separate, occasionally intersecting narratives following different survivors and their stories. All of them are nameless, but nevertheless distinct and compelling. Although the lack of names does contribute to a general distance in the ambiance, it is obviously a stylistic choice as is the clipped manner of dialogue and short almost staccato like sentence structure. I enjoyed it in a way, it provided a certain succinctness to the narration, but for a dialogue it didn’t work to the same extent, instead making it seem like every single otherwise completely singular individual spoke exactly alike. The other thing is that the book and the stories within it seem very episodic, like sketches more so than actually proper plots. It helps to know (something inexplicably omitted in the description) that this book is set in the same universe as Barnes’ previous book, information I found out on GR after the fact. Not sure if the two are sequential or merely parallel, but maybe both provide a more complete picture. Or maybe both are just collections of character journeys. It works as is, especially if you’re in a mood for a relentlessly bleak near dystopian future that’s entirely too plausible for anyone following the news. But it is all very one note, very sad note, quite heavy and probably not for everyone. Gimmicks aside, it’s well written, but words like entertaining or enjoyable wouldn’t really be the appropriate choices to describe this book. It reads very quickly too. But by no means an easy single sitting one afternoon read. Thanks Netgalley.