My 2019 resolution reading schedule was temporarily derailed today by the arrival of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, by English author Tade Thompson. At 117 pages, it's a surprisingly thin text in the current monumental science fiction marketplace, not to mention a bit pricey at $13.75 CAD.
Regardless, I was intrigued by the concept for the novel*: imagine if any time you cut yourself, your spilled blood created a perfect duplicate of you that wanted to kill you.
Because I'm a quick reader, 117 pages is nothing - I was able to split the book between my bus ride home and some time on the couch after dinner while Karli watched The Bachelor, and finish it off the day it was received,
The story starts out well, and has a suitably karmic ending, but there were a few spots in the middle that didn't quite add up, and a couple of dead ends in the body of the narrative that I would like to have seen explored further.
I was also a bit disappointed to learn that Molly Southbourne's unusual condition may be caused by an experimental drug taken (in both senses of the word) by her mother - I might have been more satisfied if there had never been an explanation for the problem, just have it be a fact of her life like breathing or sleeping.
Summary: a quick, entertaining read, with a unique and original concept, well written, with some excellent descriptive passages. On the down side, it lacks a certain amount of internal consistency, and it might have helped the story out if Mr. Thompson had written a few more pages. Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was, an unusual short conceptual piece, and plan to hunt down some of Mr. Thompson's other work based on my initial introduction to his style.
- Sid
* Technically speaking, it's probably a novella - according to the internet, a novella is "between 17,500 and 40,000 words", but Mr. Thompson doesn't provide a word count.
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