Thursday, November 14, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson




The Rosewater Redemption is the third in Tade Thompson's Rosewater trilogy.  The first book in the series was in my opinion an absolute classic - a tale of alien invasion in Nigeria in a particularly unique fashion.  The original's non-linear story allowed for a fascinating tale in a cynical crapsack world, with at a take on humanity's value that was both cynical and sadly realistic.  The second book in the trilogy wasn't any less complicated - god these books are complex with how they mess with timelines, psychic and real worlds, and character motivations - but was almost more conventional in its aims: it seemed to make the story more of a standard humanity vs alien invasion narrative, if one with some very weird and strange aliens and a non-western setting.  As a result, while it still worked, it didn't have that same specialness of the first book.

The Rosewater Redemption continues the vein of the second book - this is now a book about humans dealing with alien invasion in many chaotic ways, and the conflicts that erupt.  And well, I called the second book a bit of a mess with the motivations and actions of many conflicting actors, and the third book takes that to a new level.  It's a hell of a book, really and a crazy ride.  I still agree with my original thoughts that the result isn't quite as tremendous as the initial installment, but it's still a worthy capper to one of the more original works I've read in a long long time.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
This is the story of the last days of Rosewater as told by Oyin Da, the Bicycle Girl, the revolutionary, the traveler through time, space, and the impossible.

Rosewater: The city in Nigeria where the alien, Wormwood, took root, spreading healing to those waiting outside its dome.  The city where the egotistic and power hungry mayor Jack Jacques has made a bargain with the alien Homians to give the reanimated bodies of the dead to the alien minds.  The city where gangsters, robots, hackers, security officers, intelligence agents, and one incredibly powerful, if erratic, (psychic) sensitive reside and fight for their lives.

This is the story of Rosewater's last days, as its denizens and former denizens fight for some form of future, whether that be with the aliens, against the aliens, or for some other more limited or grander purposes.  Will humanity's replacement by the aliens continue until extinction?  And is it worth the cost it might take to stop it?
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I thought about trying to write a plot summary here that is decently descriptive, took two seconds to try and think about how that would look, and then gave up.  There's just so many competing plotlines here, and character motivations and actions, that I'd have to either write five to six full paragraphs to pull it off, or would have to leave a lot of significant things out.  Given that this is the third in a trilogy, if you're looking for a plot summary at this point, well I'm confused.  If you're reading this review and you're curious whether you should be interested in this trilogy: the answer is yes absolutely, but I'll direct you to the earlier books where you should start first.

So yeah, as with the last book, the Rosewater Redemption is a crazy mess, but one that all comes together to work.  You have the ostensible protagonists of the first two books, our couple Aminat and Kaaro, still living together but beginning the book on clearly different sides with different objectives - Kaaro is once again helping Femi with her anti-alien activity while Aminat is helping Jack Jacques trying to keep the cohabitation between the aliens and humans in Rosewater together.  You have Jacques with his selfish motivations as he tries to keep his city together and his own position, You have Jacques' wife Hannah who is against his ideals of cohabitation with the aliens - at least in this fashion.  You have Femi with her "at any costs" mentality of trying to save humanity, and then you have a couple of gangsters whose agendas are as simple as being mob bosses and doing small crime.   You have the aliens themselves, who differ in their methods as to growing their numbers, with some being willing to kill humans to speed up the process.

And then you have Oyin Da, the bicycle girl.  The book doesn't really have anything close to a main character or even a narrator - only Oyin Da's sections are written in first person, but the rest of the book is written in many many POVs in third person - but Oyin Da's story is finally revealed here and it's an interesting addition to the complicated mess.  As with all of the rest, and I've missed quite a few characters, she's fascinating in her motivations and identity (which was a bit of a mystery previously), giving additional characterization to what has become of the world thanks to the aliens and the Xenosphere.

Again, like with the second book, my main complaint is that where the first book used this crapsack world to make a point about humanity, here the story is more of a standard fighting against the alien invasion story - even if how that fight takes place is ANYTHING but conventional.  It ends on a note that is less hopeful I'd say than the last book, with a tone that is a bit more cynical and fitting after everything, but a way that at least promises after everything, that there is some way to move forward to some extent.

In short, it's a fitting conclusion to the second book's story-arc, and I do recommend finishing the trilogy if you've read the second book.  It's still a hell of a series.
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