Rosewater

This is a fun and exciting read. I liked it a lot. It has a lot of everything aliens, psychic abilities, secret government corruption, robotics, the walking dead, and the space in between spaces. I appreciate that the author is also a psychiatrist. I highlighted a lot more passages than I usually do, finding them insightful. I’m also thankful for the built-in dictionary because he introduced me to some new words. Despite the little bit of extra work on my part, I was completely into Kaaro’s dangerous adventures in the xenosphere and in reality. He is the best sensitive and finder who works for the government S45. Despite being able to be in people’s memories and knowing everything, there is much kept secret from Kaaro.

Rosewater takes readers to a fascinating specfic future in Nigeria. I was immediately intrigued with Kaaro’s abilities as a sensitive, and how this was both a life-changing, unexplained superpower and a skill that got him a dully reliable corporate bank job. This blend of wild and mundane marks the best scifi for me.

From there, we take different timelines into Kaaro’s past, discovering his abilities and background, and into the story of the alien dome in the city, and into a bit about Kaaro’s girlfriend, Aminat (the protagonist in her own story), and the regular work and the secret work Kaaro does with his abilities.

Look, I normally do not like books with too many time jumps. Just tell me a good story, don’t throw out a bunch of random events that will connect in the last 5 minutes of the book! (Multiple timelines can work for me when there are just two timelines, and the stories are thematically related before they’re connected, like in Lions of Fifth Avenue, The Lost Apothecary, etc., but not always, and this format never works for me in a suspense novel where the big twist is that someone changed their name in the intervening 20 years. UGH.) So there are a few different timelines in Rosewater, with jumps between them, which is a little bit disorientating in a world that’s already so wild and strange, but each jump takes us to such an intriguing blend of bizarre and mundane that it pulled me in. Kaaro, our protagonist, is a “sensitive” with a special ability to pick up other people’s thoughts and feelings. He needs to tamp it down to do daily things, like ride the subway, and I was nodding along (who hasn’t felt overwhelmed by unhinged emotions on public transit?) until he mentioned that the subways run either clockwise or counterclockwise around the massive alien dome in the middle of the city, and sometimes the undead ride the subway, too.

A mysterious dome has appeared in rural Nigeria, and the city developed around it. The dome opens occasionally, and people who are near the opening can be healed, but their healing comes with a terrible risk. While many people are cured of disease or disability, others looking for healing have strange side effects, almost as if someone with stunning healing powers but no concept of a healthy human body was doing their best…

I also tend not to like scifi or fantasy with too many strange and special new powers. There’s an old XKCD about how the amount of specialized vocabulary has an inverse proportion to how good the book will be. It’s often true, but in Rosewater, there was so much new to me that when something was unfamiliar, it could be a Nigerian thing, a Kaaro thing, an alien thing, or a secret, and I really enjoyed this discovery. Kaaro is so matter-of-fact about life in Rosewater besides an unexplained alien dome, his mental powers, his past as a thief, and so many other wild events that I was just pulled along.

Although this novel had narrative elements that I usually moan about, this was such an intriguing story and Kaaro is such an fascinating character that those didn’t slow me down at all. Rosewater is an alien discovery story, but also a personal discovery story. This is the first of a trilogy so obviously I requested the other two immediately. I hope for some more of Aminat in the next ones!