Genre: Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi, Dystopian
LGBTQ+ Category: Non-Binary
Reviewer: Scott
Get It On Amazon | Publisher/Universal Buy Link
About The Book
“I remember how things used to be. I had a garden with flowers in it. I’ve seen the ocean, I’ve eaten real food. Now all we’ve got is this.”
Bermondsey’s inhabitants are shut in, all their needs met in automated tower blocks. No one goes outside because the streets regularly flood. Just to keep rich people on the other side of the river safe.
Idonny’s days are spent answering pointless online surveys for luxury goods she’ll never see, her nights in the arms of tough guys who only see her as a warm body.
Everything shifts when Idonny meets Kaver, an injured stranger who needs her help. For the first time, she defies her current boyfriend to help Kaver. She reaches out to her neighbors in the tower block, banding together against the gangs prowling the hallways.
Then, the government begins withdrawing resources from her community and food becomes scarce. Idonny tries to get involved in the underground economy providing for her fellow residents, but they don’t trust her. And her forbidden friendship with Kaver deepens, offering her a chance at real love-if she’s brave enough to take it.
When violence between rival gangs erupts around her, Idonny must decide whether to stay enmeshed as the ever-loyal girlfriend or strike out on her own.
The Review
Bermondsey is a real place. I checked. It’s on the south side of the river Thames, in London.
In Sikes’ fictional world, this district has become a huge residential tower, joined by others of its kind along the South Banks of the river.
London and all of England have been subject to horrific climate-change-related flooding, and at some point the poor folks have been locked up in the region south of the river in these towers, where they can come and go freely within their zone, but cannot leave. At least not legally.
We don’t know any of this when the story starts. The genius of Sikes’ tale is that it has a really tight point of view. Idonny is one of the tower dwellers, a twenty-year-old woman who lost her mother in a flood when she was five. Her world is very small, and she hardly ever leaves the floor she lives on.
The omnipresent and yet never seen administration is responsible for food deliveries, power, and water – all the necessities of life. They bring packets of bean paste food to the food machines on each floor of the building, send medical bots when needed, and generally keep this slice of humanity separate from the rich people across the river.
It’s a horrible way to live, but Idonny can’t see that at first. She’s grown up in that society, and this is all normal for her. She’s in a relationship, if one can call it that, with one of the local toughs – a guy named Ray, who basically stops by to sleep with her every now and then, getting his own needs met but never meeting hers. Only when Ray dies and Idonny meets a non-binary traveler named Kaver does her life expand, as she starts to see the world around her with more clarity.
And as the shadowy administration tightens the screws on the inhabitants, ending food deliveries and letting the power go off, she starts to form a plan, and the world around her begins to change.
Idonny is a very appealing character. She navigates her world as it slowly expands, and we begin to see more of its contours. Part of the beauty of the story is that it’s like a weed growing in a cement sidewalk. Its stems and leaves sprout and it finds the sun, and in the process it remembers what it’s supposed to be.
Idonny and her people fight back against depression by working together and relearning what society is and what it can mean. A slumbering giant awakens after a long, cold winter, and its movements will shake the world.
Although bleak at times – this is a dystopian world, after all – Idonny’s kind and warm character act as a counterbalance to the injustices all around her. And the ending is both satisfying and left open to better things to come.
I do hope Sikes will write another story in this world, and let us know what happens next. There’s so much more to see!
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Scott is the founder of Queer Sci Fi, Liminal Fiction, and QueeRomance Ink, and a fantasy and sci fi writer in his own right, with more than 30 published short stories, novellas and novels to his credit, including two trilogies.
