7. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

I'd been looking for this used for a while.  It's pretty new and probably being reprinted since it was fairly successful.  I did find a used copy in this bloated trade paperback format (although to be fair, slightly easier to read for me as the pages go by so much quicker).  I was intrigued by the dystopic sci-fi concept with animal companions.  Unfortunately, when I was about a quarter of the way through, Meezly noticed it and was surprised that I was reading it as she had read two of her books and found them consistently badly written!  This was dismaying as I was already feeling somewhat distanced from the story, but I tried to put aside any bias and plow through.

Zoo City does at first have a cool concept.  It takes place in a ghetto for "the animaled" in Johannesburg.  For reasons that aren't at first clear (and actually were never clear for me until I read some other reviews), certain people suddenly find themselves attached to a single animal of a variety of species.  They are corporeal and real animals but seem to initially appear magically and if you are separated from them it is like agony.  If your animal dies, you get swallowed up by some weird darkness.  You also gain a magical skill.  The heroine has a sloth and she can find lost things.

The story begins with her finding a lost ring in the sewer for a client only to find the old lady brutally murdered when she returns with the ring .  She is on the scene with her fingerprints (she touched things to get a bead on the lost ring) and so gets accused of the murder.  This triggers her being engaged to also find a lost pop star twin, even though she swears she will never look for lost people (we are never really told why this is and it doesn't seem to matter as she takes the job).

I didn't find the writing as bad as Meezly did.  There are a lot of short sentences and really wild metaphors (which I didn't mind as they were kind of fun in a dystopic sci-fi Chandleresque manner).  The problem is that she is trying to do subtle inference instead of just telling you what is going on and many times, especially in the action scenes, I couldn't figure out what actually was going on.  The real problem with this book, though, is the overall plot and for lack of a better word, its intention.  It felt like Beukes went out and did an inventory of as many tropes she could find under the dual headings of "dystopic near-future" and "contemporary issues" with a particular appeal to young, woke readers.  So we have refugees, exploitation, discrimination, ghettoization, trauma and on and on.  These things are fine but none of it feels heartfelt here.  The plot goes all over the place so that by the time it all does come together, I really didn't care.  Another reviewer pointed out something I hadn't explicitly noticed, that the protagonist has zero influence in the big final climax.  She rescues the man she was sleeping but is basically an observer to the quite violent and nasty revelation of the plot secrets.

There is a nice little side piece that is an academic study of the notion of wandering spirits and how they will possess pigs and if you don't sacrifice the pig properly they will take over a human.  I guess this is some real tribal folklore from that region and it ties in really nicely to the animal companions in the book.  But that's about as far as it goes.  I can see how many readers got their fix of dark near-future detective world but Zoo City did not work for me.