She calls herself Kikiloa, but she\u2019s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in \u201cthe deep night of Africa\u2019s great rift valley\u201d some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, taking the form of a teenage girl with green eyes and impressively curly hair, which is how she appears to her friend Hazel and her brother, Lee, who are wholly unaware of her true identity until she mysteriously vanishes. When \u201cKiki\u201d then reappears, it\u2019s immediately clear to Hazel that there\u2019s something a bit magical about her. In fact, Kiki begins to suspect that Hazel has an extraordinary destiny to fulfill, one that isn\u2019t shared by the countless versions of herself who have lived and died in parallel worlds. But while Lee begins to fear that Kiki is deceiving her, Paha (Kiki\u2019s mentor) has turned trickster, bent on sabotaging Hazel through violence. Kiki must uncover his true intentions while grappling with the reality that her own life\u2014and the lives of all living things\u2014must eventually end.<\/p>\n
Larson\u2019s debut reads a bit like Sarah Hall\u2019s Helm crossed with Doctor Who, if the latter story were told from the Doctor\u2019s perspective. Characters grapple with the implications of their own near immortality and the unhappy reality that sometimes a person must die to prevent a timeline from breaking. Like Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, Larson is one of a true minority of writers who can make cerebral science fiction both lucid and entertaining. The book\u2019s relentlessly forward-moving style never once loses momentum in the course of its 400 pages. This feat is all the more impressive given the scope of the subjects under discussion, which include prehistory, the last Ice Age, multiverse theory, synchronicity, and the end of all things. \u201cAt this moment,\u201d Kiki informs Hazel, \u201cI am connected to a trillion mes across a trillion branches of the multiverse\u201d\u2014a flash of the sublime that reads like an ancient account of a deity disclosing itself to mortals. The book\u2019s thematic roots in the teachings of Carl Jung offer a refreshingly unconventional message: that embracing the most frightening parts of ourselves is the path to wholeness. \u201cWhen we accept shame,\u201d says a \u201ctime surfer\u201d named Akamai, \u201cwe become ourselves. We think the unthinkable thought\u2026We face our fears and discover beyond them bare fields enriched by fire, ready for new growth.\u201d This idea will be familiar to fans of Jung and Alan Watts, but it\u2019s rare to see it articulated at all\u2014let alone with such power\u2014in a work of popular fiction. This philosophical depth anchors the multiverse shenanigans in a tangible, and very human, reality.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
She calls herself Kikiloa, but she\u2019s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in \u201cthe deep night of Africa\u2019s great rift valley\u201d some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}