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I thought a weird mashup of post-apocalyptic Earth and Buddhism would somehow be more interesting than it ended up being. Don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff to like here, but the overall story never seemed to rise to the point where I got interested and engaged with what was going on.

Karma (yeah? yeahhh? get it???) is a boy growing up in a village on the post-apocalyptic Tibetan plateau. Six cataclysms happened a long time before (six suns) which changed the world drastically and killed the majority of the population. A prophesied seventh sun is foretold to be inevitable and will result in the remaining world to be destroyed (get used to this, the rhyme/prophecy for it is retold a lot throughout the course of the book). But to Karma, all of this is just a story, because he’s more concerned with his missing father, and the fact that his uncle basically hates him for existing. He learns that there’s a way to avert this guaranteed calamity, if the lama child is found in time and brought to a mystical stone in a mountain, and his missing father may know where the mountain is to be found. So, familial duty being what it is, he’s off on this quest to find his father and the seeing stone which will, somehow, stop the world’s death.

It has all the makings of something I’d be into, and don’t get me wrong, the prose is fantastic, but the story itself never seemed to come together. There’s a lot of quiet philosophy in these pages, which made my post-apocalyptic romp a bit more tedious than I would have liked. Additionally, the actual action parts of the book were basically all the same–Karma gets captured by bandits, Karma escapes from bandits/is rescued from bandits/is released by bandits. Always the same bandit band too. I guess when you’re the last bandit band on Earth, you’re simultaneously the greatest band ever and the worst band ever. Not a lot of credentials needed. The ending also felt really rushed and especially confusing, which knocked off a star right there for me immediately. The majority of the book had careful, deliberate (see also: slow) pacing, but the ending is suddenly flying through events and revelations like the author had a page count limit thrown at him, and it just felt incredibly disjointed.

I don’t know, it’s an interesting concept and it was almost something great, but there was just not a lot of connection between me and what was going on at any given time.

I sort of expected more from this book, particularly where important topics related to marginalized groups are addressed. I thought this book would be a good platform for discussion about the treatment of indigenous groups in America through the story of girls going missing, but it missed the mark with me.

Anna Horn and her sister Grace go to the same high school, but have very different social lives. Where Grace wants to conform to what the rest of her high school members expect of a teenager, Anna doesn’t feel compelled to. As the older sister, Anna is also employed as a housekeeper at her reservation’s casino, and it’s here that Anna starts getting the feeling that something is amiss on the eighth floor. Rather than bring her concerns to literally anyone else within the hotel, she starts investigating for herself, but not before Grace becomes involved in the whole affair.

I think this book suffers mostly from trying to do too much in too few pages. There’s the threads of good indigenous people/coming of age stories here, but it honestly felt like none of the threads were handled very carefully. There’s Anna’s struggle against expected gender roles with her sister and her high school. There’s Anna’s interest in the preservation of her tribe’s history, counter to what the rest of the tribe wants for itself. There’s the obvious mystery/thriller about indigenous women going missing. All of these could be handled on their own, but when blended together in one book kind of makes the whole a bit of a mess. When you get the issues bookended against each other, it feels all out of place.

The story is also initially written out of sequence, where you’re fed the beginning of the mystery climax up front and then are brought back and forth between “current time” Anna showing how all this started and “future Anna” neck deep in the climax. I think it’s supposed to create tension in making the reader wonder how things started and how it all converges together, but it came off a bit disjointed in execution. I also felt like the story, after the two sequences converge and we start closing in on what it all means, wasn’t a very compelling thriller. And rather than go all-in on what can happen to indigenous women who go missing, we get a rather unfulfilling epilogue where you can certainly draw inferences but nothing is outright explained. If the author wanted to discuss the hardships faced by indigenous women (as the author’s note seems to indicate), punches shouldn’t have been pulled in the end.

I guess it’s a fine book, but I don’t know if I’d consider it a thriller, a horror story, or anything that really pushes the envelope about social issues.

”One sun for the god. Two moons for his beloved sisters. Uncountable, stars to shine in the night. Oh, man and woman, born to a dark path, only look up and the lights shall guide you home.”

I can’t believe I took this long to read this book. I’m a loud and proud lover of GGK’s books, and up until this point my favorite of his was Under Heaven. How could any book be better than Under Heaven, I wondered. Surely, at most, it’d be just on par with it. I’d definitely get around to it sooner or later.

How very wrong I was. This book is now easily my favorite GGK book, by a very large margin.

To summarize a very complex book, circumstances bring together a small band of people from very different backgrounds, both political and religious. They bond through shared circumstances, and then find their bonds and loyalties tested as world events start pulling them back apart again. As with all of GGK’s books, it’s rooted in actual world history (I’m not familiar with the period myself, but it’s evidently based on Moorish Spain and the religious conflicts that happened then), but with GGK magical realism flair. Uneasy peace turns into conflict, religions clash, and loyalties are examined. It’s very complex, and I’m trying to keep things vague for my friends who want to read it.

GGK’s hand is evident here in the quality of the writing (fantastic) and how he somehow manages to make all these complex political and religious machinations make sense to the average reader. It’s not an overwhelming read, it’s very compelling and easy to digest. I instantly loved all the main characters, and was actually breathless near the end during the book’s climax. Contrary to what you might expect, the climax of this book isn’t played out on a major battlefield, but it’s exciting all the same.

I don’t really know what else to say here, except that if I could give it 6/5 stars, I would. I know that sounds fangirly, but I don’t care. I haven’t met a GGK book I didn’t like, and I very much liked this one.

Here lies my expectations, completely unmet.

Yes, a lost city is discovered. Two, actually, but we only hear about one of them for reasons. The other is mentioned a few times, but I have no idea if anything significant was there. Yes, the City of the Monkey God was mentioned in the leadup to exploring the city (also called the White City), but it never was said if this city was actually the city of legend or not. Yes, this was a true story, but more of a true story about the leishmaniasis disease than a true story about lost city exploration.

I loved the first half of the book leading up to the expedition. There was a ton of information laid out about the legend of the White City and the technological means they used to map out difficult to explore jungle regions in search of the ruins. I also loved the exploration of the ruins they selected as the likely site, and the author’s experiences there. But we spend hardly any time there at all (about a chapter and a half), before he’s back in civilization and dealing with his struggle with leishmaniasis. Which, don’t get me wrong, is a valid topic as I hadn’t heard of the disease before and evidently gets very little funding for research because of its prevalence in the poor populations of countries, I was just expecting more of the Lost City of the Monkey God in my Lost City of the Monkey God book.

I actually learned more about the ruins from the author’s article (found here: www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150302-honduras-lost-city-monkey-god-maya-ancient-archaeology ) than I did from the author’s book. Just kind of a letdown all around, honestly.