Format: Kindle
Synopsis
On her deathbed Lan makes a solemn promise to her grandson to be there for him when he needs. As a result she is stuck in the between and can't progress to the beyond (over the Styyx) until she is released. So with her Crow avatar first she has to help her grandson, to whom she was very close, through the trauma of loosing her and then gets invovled in helping the wider family deal with gettting thrown into the limelight as activists for change as a result of a granddaugters angry tweet which goes viral.
Lan observes the various twists and turns including the murder of her closest female relatives by the system they seek to change.
There is an interesting sub-plot about the nature of consciousness and death. Also an exploration of what might work as a model for building a new society from inside the ruins of the old.
Reviews
Annoying but quite good
by rogerco on Wed 16th Jul 2025.
A brave attempt to deal with an important topic - how can we deal with the current poly-crises of predatory global capitalism and find our way to a more sustainable future. Also some very interesting ideas about the nature of consciousness and the borderlands between life and death.
However it suffers from three large flaws.
The first is stylistic - it often comes across as being somewhat over-written. Like having an overlarge portion of tasty food stuffed into your mouth all at once. It is just too much. Maybe it is that she has done a lot of research and has a lot of background in herself and she seems to want to force it all on us. Perhaps for some readers this is a good thing, and makes the ideas more easily understood, but if you are at all aware of our collective predicament it just gets in the way of a good and potentially useful story.
The second, and most important, flaw is that Lan's (the dead narrator) immediate family are really annoyingly perfect in everything that they do. Always the best in some way - this really jars for a story that is firmly set in the present and rather undermines the presumed objective of the book - to map out a possible path into the future that doesn't end in our own destruction. Because the path she maps out seems to depend on a bunch of perfect people coming together with a little bit of shamanic help it undermines the plausibility. Where do we find these fantasy (non-)leaders of the movement to change. Maybe we can rely on spiritual guidance if we are in touch with the right sources, but can people like Lan's perfect family really exist - 'cos if not the message of the book must be that ultimately we are all doomed.
The third flaw is that in the last third which degenerates into a simple account of the ins and outs of a bitterly contested election battle - my feeling is that she massively overestimates the power of social media and in particular is building her future on the premise of an alternative secure online social network (secret distributed hacker teams (called grey-ghosts) able to access almost anything and developing a chat and messaging system called ghost-talk within the current internet) . Could that really happen?
However with those caveats it is quite an entertaining story set firmly in the plausible immediate future and building of a lot of elements from the history of resistance. Could it really happen - maybe, more likely something using elements of this might work. Its worth a try as one possibility. We need to try them all.