EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel: Timely, Compelling, Suspenseful

Is a dystopian novel automatically a form of mystery? Will any meaningful plunge into human quandary, loss, and occasional success result in chasing answers to crime, disaster, unfair aspects of being alive?

EXIT PARTY (301 pages, none of them wasted) is the seventh from the bicoastal Emily St. John Mandel. It opens in the year 2031, just five years from now. You can get a prime sense of the book from the opening sentence:

In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.

An easy comparison for the book would be to call it a closer-in-time sideways approach to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: It evokes the same sense of "we knew this could unfold next, didn't we?" Lives are less obviously at stake, but personal freedom belongs only to those that the State doesn't much notice. Surveillance is a fact of life. (My app-developing older son told me about 20 years ago that there was no longer privacy in our world. I've taken him seriously.)

Mandel shapes a double dystopian here: each with a version of what could take place in the next few years in our nation, our global community, our lives. Ari, short for Ibari, keeps being pinned by her own rebelliousness, which in one mirror could be independence and assertiveness, so a very good thing, and in another could reflect as anger and dangerous to the social order -- and to herself and the people connected with her.

Look for the threads that pull this book from spring blossoms and grace, to a finale that resonates like the warning bell and grief of Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Are we already seeing the Berlin Wall of our time, the leaders who self-sort between sacrifice and accumulation of wealth, and the forces ready to kill to preserve political assertions?

Don't miss this book. 

Brief Mention, THE COMPLETIONIST, Siobhan Adcock

This new dystopian suspense thriller offers up "near-future America" as a male-dominated police state after a environmental collapse -- where the very stuff of life, water itself, has to be engineered. As a result of its disastrous effects on the birth rate, pregnancy is suddenly a "must do" if it's possible -- any fertile woman is compelled to bear her child, and women must give up their lives beyond intense parenting, in order to devote "Care Hours" to their offspring, for best and most productive survival.

The title of Siobhan Adcock's THE COMPLETIONIST refers to the term the author uses for a nurse-midwife who nurtures a pregnancy to its successful birth -- and it's the career of Gardner Quinn, the missing sister of war veteran Carter Quinn. Quinn, a veteran of the water protection wars, has extreme PTSD and linked substance abuse problems. But he'd determined to respond to the request of his other sister, Fredrika, and search for Gardner.

What he can't foresee, of course, is the damage he'll do to his own family while trying to redeem it.

Adcock's earlier book, The Barter, also focused on motherhood, but from a very different approach. In shaping THE COMPLETIONIST as a dystopian crime novel, she made inevitable the comparisons with Margaret Atwood's grimly powerful The Handmaid's Tale. But Adcock is not a literary writer -- she's tuned to the quick pace and twists of a thriller instead -- and her conclusion doesn't hold up the weight of the topic she'd tackled. Read this one as a page-turner, and keep expectations modest: It's not a "change your life" book, despite the social themes. I enjoyed it, but found the ending a bit drab compared to some of the high suspense earlier in the book.

Simon & Schuster brought this out, and it's a June release.


PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.