Review: Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden
Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden follows two narrators, Seske and Adalla, as their spacefaring people excavate a new 'beast' to live in for the next tenish years. Once the animal they currently reside in begins to die, they seek out a new giant spacefaring beast and get to work making its insides habitable for roughly 50,000 people. In their new beast Seske, the next in line to rule, finds out that her making it to the throne is threatened by multiple forces, and Adalla, a 'beastworker,' becomes entangled in some of the dark goings-on aboard the ship. The two must figure out a way to save their civilization and decrease the suffering felt by the residents and the beast itself.
There is a lot going on in this book; it is probably one of the strangest worlds I have ever read, which made it kind of sad that I didn't love this book. I am still going to try out another Nicky Drayden book, and I would still recommend this book to folks interested, even though it didn't work for me overall.
I will start with the positives of reading this book! Drayden drops the reader straight into a new and strange world and makes you immediately feel immersed in this new and strange world. You get to experience living in the untamed areas of the beast, and you begin to piece together the powers at play in this world.
Drayden also uses her story to comment on many social issues. The beast they live on, and continuously kill, is used for the environmentalist commentary in a really interesting and nuanced way. The world of the book has the gender power balance reversed and exaggerated; this is used very well to show the absurdity of sexism and lets her comment on the way women are treated in our society with the added distance of making it the opposite. The whole community of people on this beast are black, hair braiding is a big part of the culture, and the experience of racism does not enter the book directly until the idea of contact with others comes up.
Drayden comments on social divisions in other ways as well; much of this book illustrates the way class divides us and the myriad of ways that the class system is used to keep people in their station and not seek system-wide change. Also, this society relies on a polyamorous family structure as the default, and the story, on the whole, is very queer, and the course of the conflict does not stem from homophobia.
All of those things about the story are wonderful, and if that interests you, then I would hope you would seek out this story and try it for yourself! I am going to transition into the aspects of this story that didn't work as well for me.
Drayden's writing style didn't really work for me. I read the beginning of the book, transitioned to the audiobook until the halfway point, and went back to reading the story to try to see what medium made this story better for my reading experience. I found her prose hard to parse at times and found myself rereading paragraphs or whole pages again and again because I was sure I had missed something important. She transitions very abruptly, and I found the action scenes occasionally hard to parse. It often seemed like something had been cut out, and I was just left with the reaction to something and not the action itself. I felt like the author was rushing through scenes that provided important information to the reader; I didn't love the experience. It was especially off-putting because the book felt very slow to read even though a lot happens. The pace dragged in sequences that should have made me feel like I was racing towards something. I felt often like big reveals in the plot or moments that were emotionally important lacked a build-up.
Much of what I didn't like about this book, I think, stems from there being so much that happens in 300 pages. This book was crammed full of political maneuvering, social commentary, character relationships, and a very interesting world which are all things I absolutely love to read. But I didn't think this book hand enough page time; plot lines just seemed to drop away and be forgotten about, especially in the last third of the book, character relationships were not given enough time to build up adequately, the reader is told a lot of what is going on between folks and not given enough time to actually see it for themselves. That last component was especially true for me with Seske and Adalla's relationship; we are told they love each other, and we see them together a little bit early in the book, but so much of this novel takes place with them apart that I was far more interested in other relationships.
The class commentary is one of the things that just seem to be dropped off in order to shift the plot. The whole first half of the book lets the reader see the class divisions in this society. A political movement develops very, very quickly and then is punished and never brought up again within mere pages of the beginning. It felt very shoehorned into the story and could have been so expansive and interesting. Also, Seske really abandons all of her ideals about classism being wrong at a point in the book, and it was not adequately addressed for me.
I was also disappointed in the way the gender commentary was done. Because this world has the power in the hands of women and none of the main characters were men, I spent a lot of the book wanting to hear from them. In this society, they are the ones who are maligned, and severely so, and the narrative doesn't give them a voice. Our main character seems to sexually assault a man with a sex doll and that is just breezed right past. None of the political aspirations of Doka, a man who Seske is considering courting, are given much page time despite a really fascinating subplot being perfectly set up for it. I was so confused by what men are actually doing in much of this society and really think that if your story is going to comment on sexism by switching the gender power balance, I want to see how men are treated in this society, preferably through the eyes of a male character. If Doka, Sisterkin, Wheytt, and Laisze were given point-of-view scenes, I think this story would have worked better for me.
I also wanted so much more time with the world-building. I didn't understand exactly how so much of this world functioned, and I really wanted to. I reread so much sure I had missed something critical because I wanted more about this society. I especially wanted to understand the family structure better, each family is meant to involve ten people, and only one can be a child. But I could not grasp exactly how the unit is structured, which was very important because two pretty significant plot elements rely on that family structure being subverted in some way; this would have been more powerful if I had understood exactly what that structure should look like.
I was also very confused by the population control methods, one of which is the family structure. At one point, we are told the beast has 50,000 people aboard, but if every ten people are having one child, then each generation should be a tenth the size of the one before? I am so confused as to how this is sustainable for as long as it seems to have been in place. Obviously, with them having finite space and very limited resources, there would be a population cap of some sort, but I have tried to figure this out so many times while reading and since finishing, and I cannot make it make sense. Also, living on the beasts is shown to be incredibly dangerous; tens of people regularly die in a single indecent how is their problem not that they don't have enough people? That seems like it should be their actual problem.
Now one of my biggest plot issues of this story is how the character Sisterkin is handled. Sisterkin is Seske's sister that should have either been aborted or been killed as a baby by the rules of the society. Her Matris, the head of the family and the ruler of the whole beast full of people, gave birth to Sisterkin and kept her unnamed and untitled within the family. She was raised with Seske but as a second class of person with no claim to a future. This character is the big villain of the story; she is a little bit younger than Seske but knows leagues more and seems to have the maturity of a much older person. She does some truly abhorrent things; I am not disputing this in any way. I just think the whole book would have been much more fascinating if she was the main character fighting for the change at the throne she had been denied her whole life. She does not even get a satisfying conclusion as the villain, nor do we really spend much time with the effects of her villainy. She does something terrible, is remanded, does something terrible, gets away with it but is punished by Seske in some way, and this kind of repeats. In the end, she is arrested off the page then the plot moves on. It was so disconcerting and not satisfying.
I gave this book 2 stars. I clearly didn't have an excellent reading experience of this book; I was so excited for it initially but just did not really gel with the writing style and was let down by the plot repeatedly. I don't think my experience of this story is representative of the majority of folks who have read it and wouldn't discourage anyone from picking this book up if it sounds like it is something they would love. I will not be continuing on with the series, but I am oddly still interested in reading one of Drayden's other books. I would love to hear other people’s opinions in the comments!
