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Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
The Blurb On The Back:
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.
Killers around the world are marked by the presence of an animal (known as shavis) that stays with them until they die, which is when the Undertow (a kind of hell) comes for them. The trade-off is that they also get a supernatural ability or talent. Zinzi can find lost things and makes ends meet by taking commissions for lost objects and working 419 scams for Vuyo (representative of a criminal group known only as the Company) to pay off an old debt. She lives in Zoo City, a slum area in Johannesburg with her shavi (a sloth) and lover Benoit, a Rwandan refugee.
When one of Zinzi’s clients is brutally murdered and the police confiscate her payment as evidence, Zinzi needs to make money fast. When she’s asked to locate a missing person – a teenage musician called Song – she breaks her golden rule and accepts the job. Doing so plunges her into a world of mutu, gangsters and murder where no one with a shavi is safe …
Lauren Beukes’s second novel is a whip-smart, original urban fantasy that mashes the darkest elements of Africa’s supernatural culture with the worst excesses of western avarice.
Zinzi’s a fascinating character – amoral, selfish, corrupt she’s a pragmatic survivor and recovering drug addict who occasionally falls off the wagon and feels guilty about causing her brother’s death. However I was less convinced by her relationship with Benoit, mainly because he isn’t given enough page time, which is a shame because there was a real emotional complexity to their situation.
The missing persons case is actually the weakest part of the book for me. Zinzi does little investigating due to the nature of her gift and due to her character, doesn’t ask any questions until it’s too late. As a result, the story begins to fray in the final quarter – particularly as Beukes clumsily closed out a supernatural sub-plot that made little sense to me.
Beukes does really well in showing the deprivation of Zoo City from Zinzi’s eyes and I was interested in the way the shavis accept the prejudice they suffer and also feed into it. The African flavour to the world-building is fresh and original and I loved how Beukes incorporated them – especially the injection of journalistic articles and academic articles to flesh out her world.
The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, which I would love to read.
The Verdict:
Lauren Beukes’s second novel is a whip-smart, original urban fantasy that mashes the darkest elements of Africa’s supernatural culture with the worst excesses of western avarice. The mystery element frays too much in the final quarter and the way a supernatural sub-plot gets closed out made little sense, but the strong world-building and stronger first person voice of Zinzi. The fact that stories from African countries are so under-represented in genre fiction is a good enough reason on its own to check this novel out.
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.
Killers around the world are marked by the presence of an animal (known as shavis) that stays with them until they die, which is when the Undertow (a kind of hell) comes for them. The trade-off is that they also get a supernatural ability or talent. Zinzi can find lost things and makes ends meet by taking commissions for lost objects and working 419 scams for Vuyo (representative of a criminal group known only as the Company) to pay off an old debt. She lives in Zoo City, a slum area in Johannesburg with her shavi (a sloth) and lover Benoit, a Rwandan refugee.
When one of Zinzi’s clients is brutally murdered and the police confiscate her payment as evidence, Zinzi needs to make money fast. When she’s asked to locate a missing person – a teenage musician called Song – she breaks her golden rule and accepts the job. Doing so plunges her into a world of mutu, gangsters and murder where no one with a shavi is safe …
Lauren Beukes’s second novel is a whip-smart, original urban fantasy that mashes the darkest elements of Africa’s supernatural culture with the worst excesses of western avarice.
Zinzi’s a fascinating character – amoral, selfish, corrupt she’s a pragmatic survivor and recovering drug addict who occasionally falls off the wagon and feels guilty about causing her brother’s death. However I was less convinced by her relationship with Benoit, mainly because he isn’t given enough page time, which is a shame because there was a real emotional complexity to their situation.
The missing persons case is actually the weakest part of the book for me. Zinzi does little investigating due to the nature of her gift and due to her character, doesn’t ask any questions until it’s too late. As a result, the story begins to fray in the final quarter – particularly as Beukes clumsily closed out a supernatural sub-plot that made little sense to me.
Beukes does really well in showing the deprivation of Zoo City from Zinzi’s eyes and I was interested in the way the shavis accept the prejudice they suffer and also feed into it. The African flavour to the world-building is fresh and original and I loved how Beukes incorporated them – especially the injection of journalistic articles and academic articles to flesh out her world.
The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, which I would love to read.
The Verdict:
Lauren Beukes’s second novel is a whip-smart, original urban fantasy that mashes the darkest elements of Africa’s supernatural culture with the worst excesses of western avarice. The mystery element frays too much in the final quarter and the way a supernatural sub-plot gets closed out made little sense, but the strong world-building and stronger first person voice of Zinzi. The fact that stories from African countries are so under-represented in genre fiction is a good enough reason on its own to check this novel out.