Review: “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” by Kelly Robson

Release Date: March 13, 2018
Publisher: Tor.com Publishing
Genre: Science Fiction

Description

“Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted past.

In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity’s ancestral habitat. She’s spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.” (via Goodreads)

My Thoughts

If the mark of a good book is that regardless of length, it leaves you panting for more, then Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is one of the greats. I literally screeched when it ended. So loudly I woke my pet rat up out of his nap and sent him skittering under the couch. No joke. This novella is far bigger on the inside than its 230 pages belie. Robson lured me in with the promise of time travel and post-apocalyptic survival, lulled me with R&D proposals financial finagling, and hit me hard with an epic adventure.

Lucky Peach has as much world building as most full-length novels. The novella tells two stories simultaneously, one set in ancient Mesopotamia and the other in Minh’s present. Robson deftly keeps them apart, the former gradually revealing itself to the latter, making it all the more thrilling when they finally fold in on each other…

To read the rest of my review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson, head over to Tor.com.

Since I’ve got your attention, Kiki continued, you might want to look over the RFP coming up next. It’s a big river remediation project funded by a private bank. You’ve never seen anything like it. You’re going to disintegrate.

Kiki shot her the request for proposal package with a flick of her fingernail.

Minh dropped out of the tree and spread the data over the orchard’s carefully manicured ground cover. She hadn’t seen a new project in ten years. The banks weren’t interested. Calgary and all the other surface habitats struggled to keep their ongoing projects alive. Some of the habs—Edmonton, notoriously—had managed the funding crisis so badly, they’d starved themselves out.

Before she’d even finished scanning the introductory material, Minh’s blood pressure was spiraling.

A time travel project. Aren’t you excited? Kiki whispered. I nearly blew apart when I saw it.

Half the RFP made sense. Past state assessment, flow modeling, ecological remediation—her life’s work, familiar as her own skin. The rest didn’t make sense at all. Mesopotamia, Tigris, Euphrates—words out of history. And time travel—those two words raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Her biom flashed with blood pressure alerts.

Thanks to Tor.com Publishing for sending me a review copy.

Do the world a favor and buy this book from your local indie bookstore or borrow it from your public library.