Sarah Gailey - Reviews

The Echo Wife

Description

Dr. Evelyn Caldwell is at the top of her field, developing disposable, purpose-made adult clones for use as organ donors, body doubles, or experimentation, but her personal life is a disaster. Her husband Nathan left her... not just for another woman, but for an illegal clone of herself - one he made by stealing her own theories and works, to add insult to injury. "Martine" is everything Evelyn couldn't or wouldn't be: submissive, dedicated to his every need, and ecstatic about bearing his children - even though her very existence is a crime and her ability to conceive should be impossible. Evelyn does her best to ignore Nathan and his new, false wife... until Martine calls in a panic. The clone made the mistake of questioning her maker, and now Nathan lies dead on the floor. The doctor and the clone now share more than DNA and one unfaithful man. They share a very big problem, one that's only going to get worse.

Review

The Echo Wife re-imagines the moral dilemmas of Frankenstein with a dash of The Stepford Wives. The product of an abusive marriage, Evelyn vowed never to follow in her cruel father's footsteps or her mother's cringing shadow, even as she develops the detachment that lets her create and dispose of what are essentially living, breathing human beings with as little care as a farmer harvesting and cracking eggs... a detachment that Martine challenges in numerous ways. While she is the living embodiment of her failed marriage and everything Nathan wanted her to be - someone so fundamentally not who she is that it was clear their marriage was doomed from the start - she also upends nearly everything Evelyn has ever believed about her own cloning projects, as she grows beyond her programming. The tale wends and wanders (and I do mean wends and wanders; Gailey never says in a sentence what she could say in a paragraph or more, which often goes beyond merely adding atmosphere into numbingly over-descriptive navel gazing) down ever-darker paths, as Martine struggles with the limits of her existence and Evelyn struggles with her own shifting understanding of what she helped create (even though Nathan stole her research, the breakthroughs were hers), always warring with the inner voices of her abuser father and victim mother and her innate tendency to reduce human beings to clinical problems to be solved or simply ignored. It dropped in the ratings for the aforementioned wandering and an ending that offers no hope on any level whatsoever. The Echo Wife may be an intriguing exploration of identity and ethical conundrums and the long, inescapable shadows cast by abuse, but I ultimately found it far too meandering and wordy and just plain depressing.

River of Teeth

The River of Teeth series, Book 1
Sarah Gailey
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Alternate Timelines, Diversity, Frontier Tales, Girl Power, Thieves
***

Description

In the mid-1800's, to combat a nationwide meat shortage, the American Congress passed the Hippo Act, importing hippopotamuses to the southern bayous. The lower Mississippi was dammed to create marshland for hippo ranches, which would provide meat and leather and jobs.
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
Winslow Remington Houndstooth, an English immigrant "hopper" (the hippo equivalent of a cowboy) whose ranch was destroyed years ago, takes a government contract to clean deadly feral hippos out  of the Harriet, the stretch of marshland between the dam and the gate preventing the hippos' escape into the Gulf of Mexico. To help him, he assembles a crew of rogues and miscreants, all the best in their fields and not a one worth trusting. While the government had intended to give him a year to round up the ferals, Winslow has a much faster plan, one with the side-bonus of exacting vengeance for his own destroyed dreams - but the caper goes wrong from the start, endangering his crew, himself, and everyone in or near the Harriet.

Review

As alternate histories go, this is one of the weirder takes I've yet encountered. Apparently, the "Hippo Act" was a proposal that almost happened... clearly proposed by people unaware of hippos as anything but large sources of potential meat. Hippos are, in fact, about the deadliest land animal known, responsible for numerous deaths annually. In a South overrun with ferals, the swamps become deadlier than any mere alligators could make them, even as the domesticated strains of riding hippos prove every bit as clever and loyal as a horse. It makes for an interesting "Wild South" milieu.
What drug this one down in the ratings was the characters. While each had distinctive personalities, I didn't like any of them, and had trouble believing several of their interactions given what little I knew of them. One in particular seemed to have no reason at all to be part of the caper in any official capacity, and ends up contributing next to nothing, a subplot that would've meant a lot more had the tangled threads of character backstory not been so deliberately hidden from me. As a result, I couldn't care overmuch about the plot, which felt both stretched and rushed. I couldn't quite tell if this was a short story made too long or a full-length novel made too short, but something felt off-kilter by the end, leaving me unsatisfied with the conclusion.