3 stars. The premise of this novel sounded very intriguing-a noir espionage thriller set in France. It’s also up for writing awards. But I guess her writing style isn’t for me and I didn’t feel like I knew or cared that much for FMC Sadie Smith or that much even happened until the end. The Neanderthal information wasn’t that interesting to me. I did like the setting of the book though.

Thank you to Net galley and Simon & Schuster for the E-book ARC.

✨Book Review✨
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner

Hey, it’s me! Super late to the party with my first Booker long list read … yes I know the shortlist is announced next week. Maybe reading the shortlist is a more viable goal for me at this point.

Huge thank you to @simonshusterca and @netgalley for an early copy of this one.

I am an advocate for an honest review so I’m going to be honest, I didn’t have a good time with this one. I spent 3 weeks with this book with some other reading in between and it put me into a straight slump. Part of me wonders if I just wasn’t smart enough for it, but I know I’m not the only one who felt like this one dragged.

So instead of more thoughts here I will recommend this to a specific audience. If you like:
Philosophy
History of humanity
Minimal plot
Unlikeable main characters
Bleak settings
Climate related/political commentary

You could definitely like this book.

I really thought I would but I just felt like nothing happened to push the plot along or keep me intrigued.

A sly take on a noir detective novel, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake tells the story of spy-for-hire “Sadie” (not, as far as we can guess, her real name) as she infiltrates eco-farming activist-collective Le Moulin in the south of France with intention of disrupting their activities on behalf of who we do not know.

Sadie is clever, funny, and a bit up herself (she’s particularly impressed by her own physical attributes). She’s definitely in “deep cover” to the point of developing a live-in relationship with a man who is a friend of one of the commune’s leaders.

As the story goes along, Sadie alludes to past experiences that didn’t go well and led her to stop spying on behalf of the government and heading instead into private practice, as it were. She tells people she’s from California (but admits she isn’t), another character thinks she’s Canadian because of her accent in French, but Sadie never lets us in on the truth. She’s one giant obfuscation to the point that we wonder whether she’s lost the connection with her true self in the process of assuming all of these identities.

A significant part of the book is given over to the emails of Bruno, one of the older mentors of the collective, who writes regularly to the Moulinards. Sadie’s managed to get inside his email and she shares with us his long diatribes about prehistoric peoples living in the region. We learn A LOT about Neanderthals and cave paintings. How it all connects remains mysterious but I found these side quests an interesting diversion.

Creation Lake reminded me how fun it is to read really “plotty” books, those suspenseful page turners you can’t wait to pick up when you’ve put them down. I loved when friend called it “French Birnam Woods” and I also liked imagining it happening in the same world as Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party. If you liked either of those two books, you’ll likely get on well with Creation Lake.

With loads of history and details to keep you interested (and maybe act as red herrings), Creation Lake kept me engaged throughout. As a kind of literary-eco-spy noir novel, it plays with ideas of authenticity and gender expectations against the backdrop of community organizing and environmental degradation.

Being longlisted for the Booker Prizes does of course add another lens of scrutiny. I don’t know whether it’ll make my personal shortlist but Creation Lake will definitely be a book I readily recommend to readers who just want to get lost in a good story.

There’s always one big flop on the Booker longlist, and this is it for me.

The narrator, a former spy-turned-freelance infiltrator, is currently in France to infiltrate a collective and also get them to kill someone. Part spy novel, part thriller, part info dumping about anthropology, this follows the efforts of the narrator to carry out her mission, even as she makes mistakes, and the critical mission which got her dumped from the FBI is back in the news in the US.

I think I could have liked this if it wasn’t so overwritten. Kushner was also in a rush in certain parts, and the pacing is off. I seriously considered not finishing this, but stubborn commitment to the Booker longlist kept me going. I wouldn’t have picked it up to begin with, otherwise. The questions Kushner asks about activists and non-mainstream movements are depressingly surface-level.

This was a compulsive read for me, a rare sit-on-the-beach-for-hours without getting up for a swim in order to burrow deeper into it.
Delighted to include this title in the September 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)

I have a feeling there is something about this that I just didn’t get, but was never captivated by the narrative and found it overwhelmingly flat and insubstantial. The plot is not particularly complex or surprising; I think I was supposed to find the narrator’s amoral, detached sensibility interesting, but I didn’t; the prose was nothing to write home about. I can see how others will enjoy this subversion of the eco-thriller, but there was just nothing about it that I found impressive or memorable.

I would like to thank Net Galley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately, I had to DNF. I managed to read almost up to 50% mark but I could not continue more.

The writing style did not do it for me and I kept wanting to skip the informative paragraphs more and more. The way the plot was written, I was hoping for a sci-fi espionage story, but it ended up being multiple unclear timelines with story sprinkled between the informative emails about Neanderthals vs Homo Sapiens.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

I read this in one sitting, not because it was 'a propulsive page-turner' (it is not), but rather because I was on a plane. It was an odd book - lots of philosophical musings and information about Neanderthals and society, interspersed with sections about 'Sadie' infiltrating an activist commune in rural France. Sadie was an interesting narrator and the writing was very good, but I'm not entirely sure what I think this was really 'about', what the point of it was...

Going to preface this with the fact I loved The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room so my expectations were rather high.

There is a good book in here, the eco thriller components and reverse lifestyle dissection of going back to years of the Neanderthals (Thals in this book) was brilliant, fresh, relevant and honestly one of a kind.

But…there is a lot of distraction, Kushner pauses almost every few paragraphs with tangents of over explanations, past anecdotes, history lessons and the such and it was painful and it’s hard to skim because this happens so often in the story and I just felt frustrated and kept losing the central focus.

I can see why this made the Booker long list, the writing is biting, relevant, it offers alot of food for thought in regards to our future as a species. But I do not think this will be shortlisted because it lost its focus, it lacked continuity that would set it apart and for that I can see it losing points.

Settling on a 3/5 and remain a Kushner stan.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC all opinions are my own.