”She wanted to be cared for and to care for no one. She wanted to have everything she needed and not be responsible for reciprocating any of it.”
Professor Ember Agni is trying to balance an unfulfilling career in academia and a crumbling marriage, all while pursuing her true passion: unearthing a lost empire that no one else believes existed. Just as she is about to give up on her ambitious expedition, a former student writes to her claiming to have found something extraordinary – an artifact that hints at the type of civilization that existed before humanity fled north. With vindication finally within reach, Ember risks everything for the sake of discovery and undertakes a journey that will either make her famous or ruin her.
I think the above quote really summarized the type of character Ember is. She is extremely selfish and puts herself first in all ways. I’m sure a lot of people are going to read this book and find her extremely unlikeable. She is driven and determined to achieve her goal at the expense of everyone around her. Ember lied to pretty much everyone in her life to achieve her goal, treated her husband as extremely dispensable, sent her former student who she knew had mental health issues on a dangerous mission and was willing to put everyone at risk for the pursuit of her objective. I didn’t have this problem at all. I’m actually drawn to characters like this especially when it’s a woman. I think extreme selfishness is a characteristic we do not see associated with women often so when I encounter them in literature, I find these women difficult to hate. Especially because she was absolutely right in her hypothesis, but everyone treated her like she wasn’t.
Climate change plays a significant role in this story. Set thousands of years in the future, the novel begins in the Commonwealth which I believe is present day Greenland. We are told that thousands of years ago, humans moved north to avoid the extreme temperatures that warmed earth and caused so much death and drought. The people of the Commonwealth believe that the humans of that age (which becomes quite startingly clear is us now in the present day) had no technology and they claim Commonwealth is the greatest civilization ever built which Ember disagrees with. Ember believes that the humans of the past had great technology and has put in grant requests after requests to be able to go on an expedition legally which were continuously rejected and her theories mocked.
By the end, I found that the author took the easy way out by making the end very ambiguous as if refusing to reward a person like Ember with a triumphant return. The crash and burn of the last 10 pages completely angered me and was completely unlike who the author had convinced us that Ember is. Ember is too logical and too focused on her goal to prove her rightness that the possibility that she would lose her mind and make such insane decisions does not seem to gel with her character for me at all. Ultimately, this limited my enjoyment of this book. Also, I wish we would have heard more detailed theories about the finds on the Island that the archeologists landed on, I wanted more “archaeology” that would make the find more recognizable to present me, I wanted to think – “omG, they’re in a church or a subway station or a house” but ultimately I could not even wrap my head around the find and there was no wink at the audience about what they had actually found like the find at the beginning of the book which I immediately knew the identification of and made me smile.
If you do not enjoy character driven books this is not for you and if you need your characters to be likeable or relatable, this book is also not for you. I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 