City of Orange

by David Yoon

A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone.

 

   He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket?

    He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in.

   He could swear his daughter’s name began with a J, but what was it, exactly?

    Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy—and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past.

   He can’t even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I?

    Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.

• ISBN10: 0593422163
• ISBN13: 9780593422168
• Publish Date: 24 May 2022
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: G P Putnam's Sons
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780593422168

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

City of Orange is a standalone dystopian speculative fiction novel by David Yoon. Released 24th May 2022 by Penguin Random House on their Putnam imprint, it's 352 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a very well written epic journey novel through an apocalyptic landscape. The protagonist is essentially a tabula rasa; no idea who he is, where he is, how he came to find himself there, or *why* he is there. The book follows his attempts to find a context in an nearly universally dire and dangerous environment. 

The author is a virtuoso wordsmith. The initial confusion and jerky / uneven narrative is *clearly* 100% intentional. After the first chapters (they're short), I found my pace in the book and it became engaging and transportive, if still quite often dark. I haven't seen other reviewers liken it to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but there were a lot of parallels for me. 

This will be a divisive novel and it will garner a lot of antipathy as well as zealous support. I think it's a brilliantly written book, but not at all an easy read. It's not derivative and doesn't remind me of anything in my current memory, but fans of Station Eleven and The Road with a dash of Twilight Zone will feel right at home. I found the ending somewhat ambiguous. 

Four stars. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.