Oh, this is such an awesome review of Bridge from Kirkus Reviews. Some major spoilers, reader be warned, there’s a spoiler safe version on my website! Read their full review here.
“What if it were possible to inhabit different versions of yourself in different realities? Beukes explores the scientific and ethical ramifications—with a healthy dose of speculative horror. […] The worldbuilding here is skillful, as is the pacing—Beukes avoids dropping anvil-like plot points or world details, trusting the reader to unpack clues and read between the lines.”
A spoiler-free snippet from the review –
“What if it were possible to inhabit different versions of yourself in different realities? Beukes explores the scientific and ethical ramifications—with a healthy dose of speculative horror.
Cleaning out her estranged mother’s house after she dies, Bridget Kittinger-Harris finds a horrifying husk she recognizes as “the dreamworm,” sparking memories from her childhood of strange adventures and her neuroscientist mother’s odd, sometimes dangerously neglectful behavior.
The worldbuilding here is skillful, as is the pacing—Beukes avoids dropping anvil-like plot points or world details, trusting the reader to unpack clues and read between the lines. Bridge’s world is not our own, featuring something called Lifebook instead of Facebook and a pandemic faced by a President Harris rather than Trump and/or Biden, but the differences are subtle enough that we can believe there really might be an infinite number of universes, and selves, out there somewhere. And maybe grief itself, Beukes suggests on a deeper level, is strong enough to alter space and time.
Effective as metaphor but mostly ass-kicking, mind-bending entertainment.”
Image credit: Image via @laurenbeukes
