Borne: A Novel

This book was my savior during my grandmothers death. I couldn't bend my mind around what was happening. I couldn't sleep or stop thinking. I was reading voraciously, devouring books, anything to get a break from reality... This book is a break from reality. It is beautiful, violent, absurd, engaging, and always surprising. The characters are magnificent, the relationships satisfying, the implications horrific. This is a book that sticks. I did not want it to end, but the ending was beautiful. If you read the premise, you will likely walk away, but if you just let this book happen, you might be like me and walk away with something special. It also lead me to The Southern Reach Trilogy, which is different and I loved it, but this book, this book is something else. For me it is all-time, ranked with the books that I will come back to again and again. Thanks for the recommendation Sci Fri!

If I could describe this book in one word it would be: Bizarre. I want to comment on the genre, because though it is definitely science fiction, I think there's an argument for survival horror in there as well (and I sort of reveled in it). The writing style really clicked with me here. It was both poetic and punchy. It complemented the overall feeling of the book while still being impactful, and I'm really excited to check out this author's other works in the future. The beginning starts tame enough. Just another day in the post-apocalyptic neighborhood, scavenging for biotech. Climbing giant psychotic killer bears and rifling through their stinking blood matted fur. Yes, that's the tame part. Rachel brings home an odd piece of biotech she's never seen before and decides to name it Borne. He's an invertebrate sea anemone type creature who can change shape and size. Her lover and roomie Wick, an ex-biotech scientist and a memory beetle drug dealer, immediately wants to break him down, crack him open and see what's inside. But Rachel likes him. Rachel wants to keep him. Rachel puts him in the window like a decorative plant. This is where the fun begins. Borne was far and away my favorite character here. I loved the way he spoke. I loved the way he learned and grew. I loved that you could never really trust him. I loved that when it came to Borne, Rachel wasn't exactly reliable. She loves him the way any mother loves her child, blindly. I enjoyed Rachel and Wick's characters as well, and I think Vandermeer did an excellent job making them all very human. The story could be slow going at times. The action part of the plot is centered on day to day survival, while in the background the reader has all these mysteries propelling them forward. What is Borne? Can he be trusted? What is happening at the Company? What's wrong with Wick? Why can't Rachel remember what happened to her? The ending is ambiguous and will leave you with questions unanswered and many things to think about. My only real complaint about the book, was that the world that all these characters lived in occasionally felt devoid of other humans. For example, Wick is a drug dealer. He sells memory beetles to people who can't cope with reality and just want to forget, or remember someone else's life instead of their own. I really would have loved for the author to have done something with this concept. The world is filled with monsters galore, but there were no other people (save for one other person, who I won't spoil). I just kept wondering, who is Wick selling all these memory beetles too? Where is everyone else? There is talk of territories between the drug dealers but it never seemed like there would have been enough humans to sell all these biotech drugs to. Overall I enjoyed it. It was unique. It was weird. It was fun. It gave me something to think about. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for something different, a little change in their regularly scheduled programming.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Well written with twists and turns, innovative world-building, interesting characters and clever plot development. Def recommend.

This book is good, not great. Nice world building and unique points of view. I felt a little underwhelmed by the ending, though it's not a bad or inconsistent one. But the main antagonists are unsatisfyingly dealt with. After a book building both of them up, it was just disappointing.I just didn't think there was enough "meat" here to justify the price of the book. An interesting idea with quirky main characters, however tonally the book is all over the place with many whimsical moments jarringly interrupted with gruesome violence. I'm sure this was on purpose as one of the main characters is literally growing up from naivety to maturity, but it didn't quite work for me for some reason. I also don't know why Vandermeer's books are so expensive. This one in particular was a nice but quick and easy read. I liked this enough to look at his other work but the price-points are the main barrier to me picking up any more of his stories. He just hasn't convinced me he's good enough or says enough to make it worth it. Those looking for a quirky unique scifi novel who aren't particularly price sensitive should pick it up. Just don't expect the Hyperion Cantos and you should be alright.

A captivating novel set in a fascinating post-apocalyptic world that has huge potential. However, I find the writing style slightly disjointed and confusing and I think this book could have been much more satisfying if it had been a little bit longer. Delve into the details of "The Magician", explain a bit more about Mord. Maybe I'm dense, but some things were so abstract and hard to imagine that I needed a bit more concrete description in order to fully grasp what the author was alluding to. Plus, the end of the book includes several big twists that took me completely by surprise and left me feeling a bit disappointed. There could have been more foreshadowing in order to prepare the reader to accept these revelations. And the end of the book left me thinking, "what next?". Surely there are implications of the discoveries Rachel made.

On one level, this is a brilliant work of speculative fiction, describing a dystopian world (or worlds--we're never sure) ravaged by climate change and the unchecked development of biotechnology. Rachel, the narrator, recalls her childhood, most of which she spent as a refugee after her island home succumbed to rising seas. Somehow—she can't remember how—she loses her parents and ends up in a poisoned, devastated city where she has to eke out a living as a scavenger. You have to employ a willing suspension of disbelief. The most destructive of the biotech is Mord, a building-sized, flying bear who tyrannizes the city. The title character is a talking, shape-shifting, self-reflective, hilarious squid-like creature. They work because of VanderMeer's skill at world building and his humorous touch. On another level, the book is an insightful examination of the motives that build and break relationships: love, trust, jealousy, betrayal, and forgiveness. The emotional center is the relationship between Rachel and Borne. Rachel salvages Borne, finding him matted in Mord’s fur and hiding him under her shirt, where he "beat against [her] chest like a second heart.” Rachel raises Borne, experiencing many of the typical joys and fears of parenting as well as deep uncertainty about Borne’s nature. Their relationship turns into something else, something I can’t quite define, something like friendship, but deeper. When, despite her lessons (or maybe because of them), Borne becomes something other than what she wants, her heart is broken. Prepare yourself to be hard hit emotionally; I cried more than once. I found Rachel's relationship with her partner, Wick, to be less compelling. He is not a likable character, but this isn’t a fault of the writing: Rachel herself often paints him in a less-than-flattering light. Wick’s explanation at the end for much of his behavior—including his jealousy of Borne and betrayal of Rachel—left me cold. I think that's one of VanderMeer's points: expecting people to be as we want them to be is futile. On yet another level, the work is a meditation on the questions that we all want answers to: why are we here? Is each of us unique, and does that mean we are alone? What is our purpose? Do we even have a purpose? What does it mean to be a person, and is that synonymous with being human? Is there sentient life that isn’t human? Why do people commit evil? What becomes of us if we knowingly commit heinous acts just to survive? Where do we go when we die? Much of the emotional resonance comes as Borne grapples with these questions with a child-like simplicity and struggles to be good despite irrefutable evidence of what he is. How he answers at least some of these questions and finds peace … wow. So poignant. Buy this book now and find out for yourself.

The story is told by Rachel about her drug dealing boyfriend and a creature child named Borne. So far not entirely too weird. The further you read the more the story gets stranger. The world is like an apocalyptic Earth but not quite. The memories that Rachel have of the past fit more our time but don't fit with the current Earth she's is in . Even her creature/ child Borne asks her if her memories really happened. You kind of wonder if Rachels past memories are real or just a fantasy she made up to cope in the environment she lives through. Even though the story is really strange its still really good. The ending was great and a little hopeful.

The title character is discovered early on in this novel, hitching a ride on the "giant bear Mord" as a remora or a barnacle would. Mord. . .Borne's counterpart? complement?. . .drinks from the poison river in the shadow of the Company in a post-apocalyptic city. VanderMeer tells us,"Mord dove from on high and relieved some screaming pieces of meat of their breath. Reduced them to a red mist, a roiling wave of the foulest breath imaginable. Sometimes the blood made him sneeze." So, yeah, Mord's not exactly a good guy (and apparently has a minor allergy to human blood (totally not relevant to the story)). What we're not sure about is Borne. . .a protean, goo-creature in a world where bio-tech has been created for purposes of attack and defense. Borne is brought into the post-apocalyptic "sanctuary" of the narrator, Rachel, and her main squeeze, Wick, who has some expertise in bio-engineering. From there, the main storyline begins. . .how did Rachel and Wick end up together, how do their views differ on raising Borne, what is Borne, and how is Borne teaching them to be human and vice-versa? We explore these questions as that threesome leaves their not-so-comfy abode to explore a poisoned, urban landscape inhabited by leftovers from society. . .the Magician, miscellaneous scavengers and no goodniks, and Mord's hench-bears. If you're a fan of VanderMeer and in particular, The Southern Reach trilogy, I suspect you'll like Borne. Be careful. . .it's very anti-bear. There are no moderate bears trying to foster understanding of how their unfortunate circumstances led them to their behaviors. No bears struggling with a conflicted relationship with their rapturous bloodthirst. They're not nice. Seems like if VanderMeer was as pro-bear as he claims in his acknowledgements, he could have chosen a generic hair-beast. I mean, we're living in a world of advanced bio-tech, but let's not get sidetracked. Borne is less dream-like than Southern Reach but echoes many of the same themes. . . "Wick was grappling with this, with the shock as much as I was, the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist just as it seemed impossible I had ever trailed my fingers through the water of a pond to let the little fish nibble or watched mudskippers through a school-yard fence or eaten at a fancy restaurant."