“The trouble with wanting to do the right thing is that frequently the right thing today is the wrong thing for tomorrow, or the wrong thing for the people who are standing between you and your perfect, platonic future. The wild was the wrong place for our elephant, just like the recycler was the wrong place for Billie, and the cities were the wrong place for me.”

A tale of bioengineering, a carnival, and the cost of finding one’s right place.

I really enjoyed the way McGuire built this world, which was a futuristic look at Earth when bioengineering and changes due to things such as climate change border on the extreme. Beyond that there was also the theme of this carnival and the carnival life within the family that ran it. It was the perfect length for the story it was trying to tell and I could see it as part of a bigger story, but it did move at a pretty slow pace for me. At times it felt like the language just didn’t flow as well as McGuire’s writing typically does, so that did bring down my enjoyment a bit.

Happy reading!