Leaf 🍂 reviewed Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Review of 'Zoo City' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
In the end, I really enjoyed Zoo City. The ideas are fresh and meticulously fleshed out (the loving burden of guilt that the animals became was poignant) and the characters just as much. A lot of first person novels suffer from a lack of personality in the narrator, a 'neutral lens' effect that leaves you without clues to their personality outside of their actions. That is certainly not a failing of this book. Zinzi is strong, mouthy, smart, and incredibly relatable. She forms real relationships and reacts to threats to her friends in ways that are not always logical but are extremely in line with human sentiment and the shape and growth of her own character in particular. Even better, her actions are so organic as to seamlessly drive the plot—rather than the plot transparently driving her actions. In other words, Beukes is a very good writer.
I'm very much …
In the end, I really enjoyed Zoo City. The ideas are fresh and meticulously fleshed out (the loving burden of guilt that the animals became was poignant) and the characters just as much. A lot of first person novels suffer from a lack of personality in the narrator, a 'neutral lens' effect that leaves you without clues to their personality outside of their actions. That is certainly not a failing of this book. Zinzi is strong, mouthy, smart, and incredibly relatable. She forms real relationships and reacts to threats to her friends in ways that are not always logical but are extremely in line with human sentiment and the shape and growth of her own character in particular. Even better, her actions are so organic as to seamlessly drive the plot—rather than the plot transparently driving her actions. In other words, Beukes is a very good writer.
I'm very much hoping this isn't the last we see of Zinzi December. Regardless, it certainly won't be the last novel I read by Lauren Beukes.
