kalventure
Written on Oct 23, 2019
The Light at the Bottom of the World won the Best YA Setting & Best YA Cover categories of the 2019 Bookish Reader's Choice Awards!
The Light at the Bottom of the World is set in the year 2099, about sixty-five years after a cataclysmic climate event made the ocean’s waters rise and the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. What remains of humanity lives 1,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, stuck in the past and afraid of the unknown.
“Hope had abandoned them to the wrath of all the waters. The great Old Floods had done more than exile humanity to the depths of the oceanic abyss. They had also ravaged humankind of all faith and, like expiring pockets of air, sucked out any belief they would ever again live in peace.”
Shah absolutely nails the atmosphere. Even though I have never done more than snorkeling, I could envision the world that she created. Dark and mysterious, a never-ending expanse for exploration but danger is in every crevice. The world-building is fantastic and the tone of writing captures the anxiety and fear of what lurks outside of safety. Because while humanity has continued, it’s as dangerous as ever.
“Beneath us, the undergrowth is an endless expanse of ancient trees, all uprooted and toppled over one another. The mass of plants – a mixture of long dead and evolved new life – ripples as if the ground itself is alive, whispering, plotting.”The writing is descriptive without being over-burdened, and as a result the book is a fast-paced read. I suffered from quite a reading slump in October, but I found myself breezing through the book when I picked it up. I did find the plot’s pacing to be a little uneven in the middle compared to the beginning and end of the book, but I never thought the plot dragged.
“All I see is a vast and terrible unknown ahead of me. An endless abyss of monstrous creatures and earthquakes and the all-destructive Anthropoids.”Leyla McQueen is a sixteen-year-old British Muslim girl who enjoys punk rock and racing submersibles. I am not going to lie, I loved that she was blaring The Clash when we first meet her! Leyla’s parents are both of Afghan descent and I love how much her heritage means to her and her family. She’s been living alone for the past three months since her father was arrested, but no one will tell her exactly where he is. Which isn’t shady at all.
Light is told in Leyla’s first-person perspective, and like how it feels like she’s just narrating the story to her diary in a way, though. Her anxiousness and Virgo nature really come through in how the story is told. I also appreciated Leyla’s character development in the course of the book, which I can’t discuss because of spoilers.
While I absolutely loved the plot and world-building, I struggled a bit connecting with Leyla. I love her strength and courage to do whatever it takes to find and rescue her beloved papa, but this is a book that nails the sixteen-year-old perspective. This isn’t a bad thing at all – on the contrary, I think teenagers acting like teens need to be more prevalent in YA – but this is the case of right character, wrong reader.
“No past. No future.”Other than the atmosphere itself, I think my favorite part of the book is the underlying social and political commentary. Light is set in a society which is steeped in nostalgia – they revere everything “ancient” to the point that they would rather restore historic buildings rather than deal with current social issues.
“A group of off-duty train drivers in the nearby booth discuss ancient transport over a pint. ‘I’m telling you,’ a woman says, ‘Old World trains were spotless, and everyone chatted, knew one another. It was safe as houses. And they never broke down – not once. Zero delays!'”Revisionist history is one of the dangers of nostalgia, and you can see it across all sectors of the population in Light. People hold the time before as the Golden Age, helpfully forgetting all of the flaws. Spotless trains? Zero delays? On what planet? But besides that, an undercurrent of this book is the fact that history is written by the victors and we should always question everything.
Unfortunately, my reading experience was definitely hampered by spoilers in someone’s Goodreads updates. Can we all just agree not to put spoilers in Goodreads updates? I was assured the spoiler wasn’t real (“you’ll see”), but real or not it actually permanently and irreparably colored my opinion of a character. To the point that I don’t know if any of my feelings about this character are based on what I read or not. And that kind of sucks.
Overall, I found The Light at the Bottom of the World to be a solid debut fantasy story and I am looking forward to finding out what happens next. While I didn’t connect with the characters as much as other readers, this is very much a Me Being in My 30s Thing. I found the atmosphere amazing and thought Shah did a good job describing the setting, which made up my lack of character connection.
Representation: anxiety (and possible panic attacks, not explicit), Muslim rep, Pashtun rep
Content warnings: death of a parent, loss of a parent, mention of suicide, a dog is thrown by a Bad Guy (but is okay)
Thank you Disney/Hyperion for providing me an eARC of this book for my honest review. Quotations are taken from an uncorrected proof and are subject to change upon final publication.
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