Sequoia Nagamatsu: How High We Go in the Dark

 Hi everyone

This is my review for Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark. I got my copy from Bol.com and it has this gorgeous cover that totally sucked me in when I saw it online. And then I read the blurb and the book was instantly added to my cart.

"Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible."

I loved this book. It's a collection of interlinked stories centered around this plague and how the world and specific people tried to cope with it. It's focused on the people and their lives and not on action, war, crime, ...
It's thoughtful, hopeful, bleak, harrowing and tender.

How High We Go in the Dark is a slow read, the prose is beautiful and elegant, the story flows easily in a dreamy, meditative way. Because of this and the heaviness of the stories I couldn't read it for two hours at a time; I had to take pauses to digest what I had read. To ponder over the characters and the stories. And that's a sign I love a book.

Happy reading!
Helena