Thank you to Net Galley and Penguin Group/Dutton for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This is a speculative novel where we follow Sweetmint, an invisible and second-class citizen who has done everything right in life. She has just obtained a prestigious apprenticeship with an important inventor, a non-invisible who belongs to the powerful ruling class. Yet, she is looking for her brother who disappeared years ago and has recently been accused of murdering a high profile politician. The accusation does not seem right to Sweetmint and she will use her new position to find out the truth. The world building was interesting but the story didn't really click with me until maybe the last third or fourth of the book when it comes together. Of course, things are never as they seem and the story was much more interesting at the end, including commentary on society and those relegated to a second class. Overall, it was a good read but I enjoyed the author's first book more.

First thank you to Dutton books and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️✨. 3.75 stars

Synopsis: set in the future in a world where a group of citizens are considered second class and literally invisible to others. Sweetmint worked hard and starts a prestigious internship. However her long lost brother is accused of murder of an official. She doesn’t believe it but is she right?

What I liked: this book was beautifully written and deals with the hard and heavy topics that Mateo does not shy away from. I understand after the success of black buck that he wanted to try something different. I do have to admit I was hoping for a satirical novel like black buck. This novel is great as well and the effort it took to create the world and characters is amazing. I did enjoy it and the writing is beautiful. I just had my heart set on a black buck satire.

I barely even know what to say about this book besides that it's absolutely stunning. I saw this author speak at a book festival a couple months ago and immediately knew I needed to check out this new release and I'm so, so glad I did.

The writing is some of the most beautiful and emotive writing I've experienced. The author takes us on this grand journey with tons of dynamic characters and a plot chockful of political scheming and class warfare and observations on autonomy and so much more, yet he manages to make this read so smooth and approachable. What could easily be confusing or overwhelming, never is - not even once.

The structure of the book helps it read so cleanly. We experience everything through shorter chapters that capture one character's moment in time. We jump between characters and settings fairly frequently, so the pace moves along quickly and every detail is taken in bit by bit. It almost feels like watching a movie at times.

This story is heavy and thought-provoking and I know it will be on my mind for a long time to come.

Once again begging for the ability to rate half stars like StoryGraph. A strong 4.5 stars. Highly recommend.

Thanks to Dutton and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for review.

I picked up This Great Hemisphere because I enjoyed Mateo Askaripour's debut despite not normally reading speculative fiction. And I struggled to keep up with the world building, which made it hard for me to get into the book. I could feel that this book was clever and had something to say, but I didn't always get it.

This novel is set in a future dystopian world 500 years from now. The world is divided into Hemispheres instead of continents. The Northwestern Hemisphere (probably the future USA) where the story is based is populated by Invisibles and the Dominant Population. The invisibles are literally invisible unless they paint themselves and seem to be a synonym for Blacks of today. They are mostly domestics or engaged in menial jobs with virtually no civil rights. When the seemingly autocratic leader of this dystopian world is assassinated, an Invisible name Shanu or Sweetsmoke is accused of the crime. His sister Candance or Sweetmint is the main protagonist. She is an intellectual genius and trying to work her way up in life when this event happens on a coveted apprenticeship with one of the renowned Hemisphere DPs called the Creator. Initially there is a lot of world building and a lot of narrative about the rules and structure of the society, and descriptions of how the Invisibles are exploited on the basis of race and class. Thereafter, once the murder takes place the story takes a lot of twists and turns. Personally, I found the book too long in the beginning with a too quick and abrupt ending. I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable and that is always a big put-off. The police brutalities were difficult to read albeit a striking resemblance to some present-day events. There were shades of Young Adult writing to the narrative. I guess this would be suitable for those with a liking for books like the Hunger games - dystopian future with some grit and gore.
Thank you Dutton Books and Netgalley for the ARC

This sophomore novel is yet again fun and inventive and has such vivid voices. I find myself drawn into the characters and really attuned to the pace of this story.

This is speculative fiction set 500 years from now. Askaripour does a great job with world-building. This wasn't the right book for me but I am sure many will enjoy it.

I wanted to love this book so much after hearing a rave review from a friend. Sadly, this one just did not do it for me. I kept trying but at 33% I finally gave it up.

Delighted to include this title in the July edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

With This Great Hemisphere, Mateo Askaripour takes advantage of fantasy's ability to make the familiar strange in order to underscore the unmitigated horror of the United States' colonial and racist history. The novel takes place in a world where a portion of the population--coded Black--is invisible, and in turn violently subjugated by the Dominant Population. As in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the details of this world are deeply unsettling in large part because of their veracity: Invisibles work menial jobs, receive an inferior education, and are subject to the kind of persistent, creative physical and sexual violence that would feel cartoonishly grotesque if not for the echoes of slavery. Sweetmint, the protagonist, is an Invisible young woman whose efforts to navigate this inequality are complicated by her brother's implication in an political assassination. As she learns more about the history of the place she inhabits, she becomes increasingly radical in her thinking and actions. One strength of the novel is its depiction of resistance: both the individual resistance that keeps people sane amidst daily indignities and the collective resistance that offers hope for a better future. The world that Askaripour has created in This Great Hemisphere is as imaginatively wrought and vividly realized as a fantasy lover could ask for, and it continues to haunt me days after I finished the novel.

While I found the novel's world-building incredibly compelling, I was less taken by the novel's central mystery. Sweetmint is, understandably, desperate to find her brother before anyone else does, but her path toward learning the truth about his disappearance is uncomfortably dependent on good luck, especially in a world where any luck at all is almost impossible for Invisibles to access. The best mysteries earn their twists, but by the time I reached the big reveal at the end of the novel, I was already frustrated by the uneven emphasis on minor characters and the feeling that no one was quite behaving the way I expected them to. Be warned that This Great Hemisphere appears to be the first entry in a longer series; perhaps I would have been less thrown by the ending if I didn't expect at least some closure. Still, the novel's cutting ingenuity makes it worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the next entry!

A dystopian novel that, to be honest, I did not finish. The timeline was convoluted and I just found the set up to be tedious. I stuck with it for a bit, but didn’t engage with this one.

In the distant future, humans judge each other not by the color of the skin but by whether it's visible or not. Sweetmint is the rare Invisible allowed to do anything but manual labor. Her position as apprentice to a famous inventor probably saves her life when her long-missing brother Shanu assassinates the leader of the Northwestern Hemisphere. The official manhunt for Shanu, led by a politician and an officer who are awful in very different ways, leaves a trail of terror and carnage. Sweetmint's own search opens her eyes to the full iniquity of her society. An exquisitely detailed dystopia. Thanks, Netgalley.

A challenging read that turns a sharp eye on classism, racism and haves versus have nots. Sweetmint is searching for her brother in 2529- and know that the world building takes place over the course of the novel. There are many characters who often, like Sweetmint, have more than one name, which I found confusing but I was committed to understanding her quest. And they offer their POVs. Despite the setting, it's not especially sci-fi but it's definitely dystopian. I admit to getting lost about half way through, putting this down, and then coming back to it because I was intrigued by the story. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Won't be for everyone but it's a worthy read.

This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour was a great novel that has many elements of books I enjoy reading such as: speculative fiction, sci-fi, mystery and social issues. When I went into the book, I had this preconceived notion that there might be too much going on as it was billed to feature all these themes, but I think Askaripour did a great job making these elements all work together.

The story takes place a few hundred years into the future & the main character, Sweetmint or Candice (her state name) is invisible, just like the rest of her people. Yes,some people are invisible. The book starts out in the near future with the origins of invisible people. (If you ask me, the early days of invisible people would make a fascinating story, too.)

Sweetmint and the invisible class of people are disparaged and outright treated like garbage by the “Dominant Population” (or DP for short) who are visible people. If you bring this all back to “the real world,” The invisible people are treated just as BIPOC folks have been treated throughout time in the US. But, this book does not take place in the US, it takes place in some part of the word, hundreds of years in the future where the group of people in power still can’t get over oppressing those who are different because they somehow pose a threat to their power.

Over the course of this story, Sweetmint has the opportunity to see cracks in the system, learn more about how truly messed up it is, learns about herself, grows and discovers her own strength. All while her brother, who had been missing for years is accused of killing a high-ranking visible politician. This “mystery” part of the book is an entertaining ride and there are some interesting twists, that of course are made possible by science fiction (that makes it fun.)


I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys speculative fiction and/or stories of great multicultural interest. Even if you’re not too into sci-fi, I’d give this book a chance because the metaphors and parallels run deep. It’s a very well-written novel, has a fantastic pace and features a great plot.

What a powerful concept; I'm in awe of Askaripour's imagination and the world he built in these pages. This is a hard book and I had a hard time making myself pick it up, but I was glad each time I did. Though I will say I wish we could have spent more time in the near-present; the very first chapter may have been my favorite.

This Great Hemisphere is a speculative/sci-fi novel by Mateo Askaripour. It hits shelves on July 9th, 2024, suspiciously close to the 4th. Even the title seems like a nod to “Make America Great Again,” calling a government system great when it is, and always was, riddled with problems. We picked this book up because the concept of this book is compelling. This Great Hemisphere primarily follows Candace, also known as Sweetmint, in a world hundreds of years removed from our own. While many things have changed in this future world, the biggest thing is that some people have been born invisible. 
As you might guess there are advantages and disadvantages to being invisible. But the main advantage, moving in secret, has been taken away by government tracking. Invisables have been relagated to the status of second class citizens, rounded up and placed in their own communities. Candace, who is a skilled inventor, receives an internship with the world's foremost expert in the field, a man who is visible aka a DP (Dominant Population). She thinks she’s on the right track to proving that invisibles can do great things, when someone assassinates the leader of the hemisphere (basically a section of the world run as its own country). While a new leader is in the process of being elected and the invisible hope for someone to bring more equality to invisibles, Candace has bigger problems. The murder has been pinned on her brother who has been MIA for three years, now she needs to find her brother before anyone else can. 
We enjoyed this book, it kept our attention and made us think, two of the main things we look for in a novel. There are, however, a few things that kept it from being something we’d recommend to our friends (and fellow frivolous) without reservation. 
First, the things we liked:
Great world building - The slang and conventions of the future added layers and texture that made the whole story more realistic
Apart from the conventions of the people we loved hearing about futuristic inventions, (not quite as good as hoverboards and flux capacitors but we’ll take it)
The idea of invisible people and how they would experience life differently from visible people
The ways invisible people are kept under oppression, a powerful commentary on our own world
The writing style, two thumbs up from us

A few issues we had:
No talk of how people became invisible. This made me think the whole novel was more of a metaphor and kept us from becoming too immersed in the narrative. It always seemed a bit like the characters and themes were illustrating an issue rather than real fleshed out people.
The end was a bit ambiguous, it doesn’t seem as if certain plot points and motivations were full resolved
We’d really love to be in a book club that discusses This Great Hemisphere (someone invite us!), there are details that we would love to delve further into and viewpoints we’re sure we didn’t consider. This novel would be a great jumping off point for important conversations around race and the future of humanity. So if you read this book, let us know your thoughts, and maybe send a book club invite our way.
Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP Dutton for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are our own.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the ARC!

Mateo Askaripour’s "This Great Hemisphere" is a YA-tinged piece of speculative fiction that gets bogged down in inconsequential world-building. The "Hunger Games" crowd will love it, so if that’s you, I think you’ll you have a great time, and you should probably just skip my review and read the book!

The premise brims with potential—in 2028, a child is born invisible; in 2529, we follow a society that has been racially segregated by “Invisibles” and the “Dominant Population.” Our protagonist, an Invisible woman named Sweetmint, is discovering some social mobility as an inventor until her missing brother is accused of murder. Sounds exciting, right?

Unfortunately, this speculative fiction doesn’t spend much time speculating, and it does very little else to make up for it.

There is power in defamiliarizing a subject to approach it in new ways, but I don’t think "This Great Hemisphere" does so successfully. It's just so literal. For example, there are fast food restaurants placed in Invisible neighborhoods to shorten the population’s lifespan. Elsewhere, we see transparently recognizable versions of police brutality. With such on-the-nose narrative moves, it's unclear to me why this was written as a sci-fi novel at all. “What if there were racism?” isn’t really a novel take, and when it merely re-labels many of the violent realities we currently witness, it almost feels flippant. These issues seem co-opted as window dressing because there’s no real commentary—the world is too similar to our own for the author to offer new perspectives. (To be fair, near the end of the book, there’s a comment that “everything is cyclical,” but it feels unearned).

Honestly, I wonder if we’ve just passed the cultural moment where this type of storytelling is effective.

It’s telling that the novel’s opening prelude—the birth of the first Invisible in 2028—is far more conceptually and narratively interesting than the main plot in 2529. There's a reason successful books of this ilk, such as "The Handmaid's Tale," take place in the near future—these stories find their catalyst in proximity, the way we teeter on the edge of even harsher realities if only a few things change. These stories allow us to analyze our current cultural circumstances by exploring their natural conclusions.

Similarly, the first chapter of "This Great Hemisphere" sets up an exciting novel, but it isn't the one we get to read. The Invisible child’s mother is Black, and we see her experiencing various forms of discrimination before giving birth. I think there’s a better story in that timeline about how race and identity would be understood if their physical markers were suddenly gone. In the 2529 plot, it doesn’t matter—we essentially just have the word “Invisible” substituted in each time “Black” would occur. If the book weren’t so exposition-heavy and keen on highlighting the world’s mechanics, I can imagine that something so simple would be make for a powerful novella. At over 400 pages, though, The Great Hemisphere undermines itself at every turn.

None of this would be an issue with great characters, but they are painted in the broadest strokes possible, archetypical in service of a frictionless story. If you’ve ever encountered YA dystopia, you know the drill. This issue is compounded by multiple POVs, a decision that seems intended to showcase the complexities of the book’s subject matter. As a side note, one character makes an anachronistic reference to "Pinky and the Brain" (yes, in 2529), which just feels like further evidence that this story shouldn’t have been set in the future.

Ultimately, I know "This Great Hemisphere" will probably really click with its dystopia-loving audience. If you’re a reader that finds comfort in the consistency of certain tropes, there’s enough fun world-building here that I’m sure you’ll have a great time; just don’t expect to see anything new.

A new work of speculative fiction by Mateo Askaripour. This is a hard pivot away from his first novel, Black Buck, which was heavy literary satire. I'm a fan of speculative fiction and was pleasantly surprised to see Mr. Askaripour pivot in this way.

The premise of the novel is that the world is divided among several hemispheres. Our protagonists - people who are invisible - live a hemisphere where light skinned, visible people - the dominant population, or DPs - rule. We follow the story of Sweetmint, an invisible, who is thrust into a role in both worlds as they collide. Although these events take place 500 years into the future, they could be happening in certain political spheres today.

Fans of Butler's Parable Series will enjoy this work. Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the

THIS GREAT HEMISPHERE
Mateo Askaripour

This is my first experience with Mateo Askaripour. Unfortunately, THIS GREAT HEMISPHERE was a DNF for me. I couldn’t catch the rhythm that the author was writing, and I was lost. There were so many muddled details and I had trouble keeping it all together to make sense of the story.

This experimental writing did not work for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and PENGUIN GROUP Dutton | Dutton for the advanced copy and the opportunity to provide feedback!

THIS GREAT HEMISPHERE…⭐⭐⭐

This Great Hemisphere is an interesting read following an invisible woman living in a future world where invisibles are looked down upon - very closely resembling past/modern day racism. This story was so unique and the concept was so intriguing! The beginning of this book had me absolutely gripped, however, I felt as though it lost momentum throughout the story until the build up at the very end. At times, the skips between flashbacks to present were somewhat confusing. There were also multiple POVs to follow - I think it would’ve been helpful to have labels for each chapter stating the character from whose POV we’re reading from. The beginning & end were very strong, though! Overall, I definitely enjoyed this book & the overarching message behind it is so very important!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!!