Review of A Refugee's Rage by Anthony J Langford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very much enjoyed being challenged in my thinking by the two novellas in this collection. It contains two very different stories: Caught Between Love and Loss, and the title story, A Refugee’s Rage.

Caught Between Love and Loss

This story starts out as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy who buys a block of land in the bush and decides to build a house on it, but then gradually becomes a story about his girlfriend, Rachel, as she struggles to define what her relationship with Richard is. Is he just a lover? Perhaps a potential long-term boyfriend? Is she in love with him? Or is she just in love with the idea of building a house and living in a beautiful rural Australia setting? The house becomes a metaphor for their relationship as the reader wonders whether it will ever be complete. The story tugs at the heart as you hope they can find a way to really connect.

A Refugee’s Rage

In contrast to the first story, A Refugees Rage is a very angry story. It is the story of a sixteen-year-old Romanian refugee, Alexlandru, in Rome. He has had to look after himself for most of his life and will do anything to survive. He is a volatile character who readily resorts to violence to survive. The story is written in the first person so the reader sees the world almost exclusively through the eyes of someone who is not only a refugee in a foreign land, but in many ways a refugee from society. One day he meets a Syrian refugee, Ara, and the story revolves around their attempts to survive and whether his desire to survive will allow him to develop a relationship with her.

The linking factor between the stories is, I think, that both main characters are searching for a place in life. The writing is excellent and frequently poetic (Anthony J. Langford has authored a few books of poetry).

I thoroughly recommend the stories in this book as they will engage the reader while taking them out of their comfort zone.



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Quick review of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazing world building, peopled with very flawed characters who are mostly looking out for just themselves. The novel is set in a future Thailand in a world that is near apocalyptic as it deals with climate change and rising sea levels, running out of fossil fuels, and famines caused by diseases attacking genetically engineered crops. Thailand is a holdout from food conglomerates who want to introduce their genetically engineered crops into the kingdom and get access to the Thai seedbank which the Thai's have used to create crops that are disease resistant. Add to this mix are windup people or clones, servants that have been create with jerky movements, hence the term wind-up. The plot has four main strings, a battle between the trade ministry, who want to open up Thailand to the overseas food conglomerates, and the environmental ministry who don't. The second plot revolves around a conglomerate agent's attempts to access the seedbank. A third plot is the plight of a windup girl who has been abandoned to degrading work in a brothel and her attempts to escape her predicament. And the final plot is that of a Chinese Malay who escaped slaughter in his own country and is attempting, through dubious means, to survive as a despised foreigner in Thailand. All the stories intertwine and the novel comes to a satisfying conclusion.

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Quick review of When the Floods Came.

When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very well written, and an imaginative take on a future and how people might behave. It is set in England where a virus has wiped out most of the population and a few people live in isolated pockets using technology that is slowly running down. The main focus is a family that lives by themselves in an large apartment block. The story is told from the POV of a twenty something female. Children and people that age are rare. The story centres around her waiting for her finance (who she has never meet in real life, all their interactions have been on the web) to arrive, by bike - there are no cars or pods still running, while a mysterious stranger turns up, is he good or evil? The plot is not fabulous, but the story is more about how a family that has been cut off from physical interaction with others copes with this new worldly stranger and the world he introduces them too.

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