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The Lesson

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I started this book and found that it was not for me. I didn't want to rate a book that I wasn't able to finish.

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The Lesson is the first book I have read by this author. This sci-fi fills your imagination with galactic beings and worlds beyond what you can envision. The story is about troubled times where loyalties, love, and family play an intricate part in a compelling narrative full of interesting characters.

Looking forward to reading more from this author.

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First contact stories in science fiction have been used for decades to explore cultural and anthropological themes. More than anything, I would say SF writers use alien contact as a kind of emotional tonic, a way to relieve humanity’s existential distress at the very real likelihood we are either alone in the universe, or so far away from any other advanced, spacefaring species that contact with them will be effectively impossible before both we and the aliens become, in the natural course of time, extinct. First contact stories can be scary, exciting, action-packed, dramatic and serious, or satirical, and SF writers have shown remarkable invention in spinning endlessly imaginative variations on the theme.

One of these variations involves presenting the aliens as mirrors to ourselves, and that’s what Cadwell Turnbull does in his debut novel, The Lesson. It’s an unusual and mostly gentle story that nonetheless has a distinct apocalyptic inevitability, and though there are times Turnbull keeps some of his ideas perhaps a little too close to the vest for the story’s overall good, The Lesson is a story that should not be missed by readers who embraced such books as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven or even Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

For the full review, see the attached link.

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The premise involving alien species and its relationship with humans very much intrigued me thus I may have started this book with certain expectations.

Unfortunately this book didn't work for me. The multiple POVs were distracting and I found the plot quite disjointed. It took too long to dive into the subject of aliens and when it reached the point, I already lost part of my interest.

If the pacing could be more even then I might have enjoyed this title better. Interesting theme yet not well executed.

DNF @ 30%

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This is extremely literate and subtle science fiction, layered onto a story about the fallout from colonialism, family relationships, the struggle between faith and science, fear of the other and a bunch of other things I'm probably missing.

It's a different experience reading about black people in a place where most of the population is racialized, so structural racism obviously exists but isn't played out the same way as it is when they aren't a minority population. The issue of racism set against the perception and treatment of the Ynaa who are literally alien is jarring and illuminating.

The sense of place is vivid and arresting - you can almost feel the heat, smell the vegetation and the cooking. The characters are vibrant and authentic, so even though there are quite a few it's not at all difficult to tell them apart. I had no idea where the story was going to go, but there was a palpable sense of menace and melancholy, of people desperate to connect but doomed by misunderstandings of all sorts.

The way the story starts, with the occupation a foregone conclusion, situates the suspense differently from other alien invasion stories. The Ynaa presence isn't the biggest problem in some of the characters' lives, and the back story of the Ynaa ambassador is endlessly fascinating. This book led me to look immediately for everything else I could find written by this author, and I will read his forthcoming book the second it's available.

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This book was read for a podcast interview with the author on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. The hosts and guests discussed colonialism, systems of violence, Hurricane Irma, disaster capitalism, and more.

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This book was used for a podcast interview with the author on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. That interview dropped late year.

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Thank you NetGalley and Publisher for this early copy!

Did not finish - I could not connect with the plot or writing so I decided to put it down.

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I really liked how this book talked about invasion, and how it created a new form of racism from multiple perspectives. Sections of the book were absolutely propulsive and nerve-wracking, though I wish the book had explored emotions more from some of the characters.

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An interesting read. On the one hand, hard science fiction (aliens who tear humans in half, with space ships and tentacles!). On the other, a beautifully-written lens into the history and culture of St. Thomas, an examination of prejudices and bias, and a very human story of relationships, religion and family. What I liked about this combination is that the author uses the sci-fi backdrop as a tool to elevate and progress the human issues and narrative---the world building is present but recedes, leaving the reader with an emphasized view of the main characters. Also surprising is the cast of main characters: there is no hero or villain here, which is a strength. All in all a unique book, well-researched and executed. Would recommend to a certain kind of reader willing to take risks.

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This book was a great read with wonderful characters and a very well written story. An excellent sci-fi book that I recommend wholeheartedly! Thank to Cadwell Turnbull, NetGalley, and the publisher for allowing me to read and review this fantastic book.

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Turnbull has an excellent way of getting you immediately into the heads of the characters. I felt like I knew them deeply after only a few pages. It’s an interesting premise to be sure, but I found myself struggling to hold on to the story after the invasion. I kept reading as long as I did because I loved the realism of his writing style but ultimately I couldn’t get into the actual story enough to write a fully coherent review. I appreciate the ARC!

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An alien ship lands on Water Island. The aliens are known as the Ynaa. They are strange in that they don’t show their emotions, intend to do some unspecified research. What kind of research? Why don’t they tell? In exchange, the Ynaa give humans advances in medicine and other technology. The Ynaa look very much like humans but are much stronger. They also react to perceived violence or real violence with far more violence. Even the Ynaa’s violence is more excessive, the government ignores it — in other words turn a blind eye to it. Why? Supposedly the Ynaa lived by a code of survival which gives them their attitude about violence. After a few years, the humans are tired of finding a dog killed by the Ynaa and a young’s man snapped is too much. The Ynaa are being less forthcoming. The Ynaa had landed before to have one of them be a Ynaa ambassador, Mera, which had been unknown to the humans. She has been at the island for centuries where she was firsta slave. As the centuries went by she became closer to humans than the Ynaa. She questions her people’s life and secret mission. What will she do?

As I read this novel, I found myself fascinated with the humans reactions to the Ynaa and Mera. It was slow reading at first for me as I didn’t understand how the author was writing his novel. It’s more than a science fiction novel. It is a story about more than just colonialism, but also about conflicting moralities in two different cultures.
The novel is about loyalty, love and family in strange times.

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(vague spoilers, no specifics)
This book kept me up and, had it not been for work, I could have finished it in one sitting. The comparison to Childhood's End feels obvious and easy, but it's also one the book earned for me. I will sit with this pit of existential anxiety in my gut for some time thinking about The Lesson. Invasion fiction from the Caribbean makes so much sense it is surprising we haven't seen more of it.

Mera's character and her history are so fascinating and compelling, and the historian and David Mitchell fan in me both wanted more of it. Truly, I think most of my complaints about this book are that I want more, deeper, closer looks at every part of this universe.

Even though there are elements of this book's structure and organization that felt difficult, I also appreciated the reasons they might still be there. I understood the somewhat jarring jumps in timeline because it felt real to the experience of witnessing truly world-altering events. I found myself mapping out character relationships to make sense of the interactions of their stories, but even that seemed to put me in the place of an invading/arriving alien to whom humans are humans no matter the individuality. I even understood the lack of real examination of the way the rest of the world viewed the events. Honestly how many Americans even realize the Virgin Islands exist, let alone realize it's a "US Territory".

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From my review at B&N:
I’ve been a fan of Turnbull’s short fiction for some time (he’s been published in Nightmare, Lightspeed, and Asimov’s). In his first novel, he displays a sure hand with plot and characters, creating a complex world that is firmly anchored in, and made more compelling by, its roots in real history. The Lesson should appeal to fans of the socially aware and thoughtfully constructed science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler, works that are concerned with more than the gee-whiz noise and flash of strange aliens and nifty new tech, that are deeply concerned with how encounters with beings not like us might change society, even as they echo events from our own past.

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Enjoyed this book. Kept me interested all the way through. Would recommend to a fellow reader. Love the cover.

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The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull is a unique speculative science fiction/political thriller. Well drawn and relatable characters and set in a tropical island "paradise". It's unclear if the lesson the aliens are trying to teach was learned, perhaps that could be addressed in a sequel. One "Lesson" I did learn is that Mr. Turnbull
is a uniquely creative author and I will be looking forward to his next book.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

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An alien race has peacefully invaded the Virgin Islands for research purposes. As long as the aliens aren’t instigated they leave well enough alone. If instigated, they kill on the spot. This story follows many character through dealing with this invasion. Several of the character’s story lines were very interesting, but there were so many that at times I was very confused. The shifting back and forth through time also got confusing. All in all, I did enjoy the story. 3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

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The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull is a solid first-contact sort of novel that feel fresh due to its unique setting in the Virgin Islands and has some serious depth to it in the way it uses the encounter between aliens and the islanders as a vehicle for exploring colonialism/race relations, though it left me wanting a little bit more in terms of character and craft.

The novel opens pre-landing with an introduction to the various major characters, including:
• Derrick: a young sci-fi/fantasy fan who will eventually become assistant to the alien ambassador
• Patrice: his neighbor and best friend
• Jackson: Patrice’s father, a teacher and someone going through a mid-life crisis
• Aubrey: Patrice’s mother, also learning more about herself
• Grams/Harriet: Derrick’s stern grandmother
• Lee: Derrick’s younger sister
• Mera: the alien ambassador

Other characters also get some POV chapters, especially later in the book though fewer in number, some even allowed just one. We get just enough pre-contact writing to get a sense of who these people are, what their relationships are to one another, and then “a giant seashell” arrives in the sky and “Patrice thought to herself, this was how change occurred: something on the horizon closing in. She doesn’t seem imposing at first, but the she’s close enough for you to see the knife hidden under her dress.”

From there we shift briefly into a history of early invasion waves on the islands, culminating with the Carib and Arawak tribes noticing “boats bobbing on the sea, with large wings like bats . . . and pointed spears at their fronts. Boats much bigger than theirs and infinitely stranger.”

Turnbull then jumps forward five years with the Ynaa (the aliens) having settled in their landing area (and only there) and doling out scientific/technological advances as “payment” for them being allowed to stay unmolested while their work on some unnamed research project of theirs. The bribery via technology keeps the world quiet even as the Ynaa, who have a cultural tendency toward immediate, lethal violence regularly kills islanders who provoke them, often using their far greater strength to literally rip people in half. The Ynaa take on human form (though they move strangely) when they exit their ship, which isn’t all that often save for Mera, the ambassador who tries to keep encounters to a minimum. By this time Patrice and Derrick have gone out and then broke up when Patrice decided to go to school stateside while Derrick stayed on the island and now works as Mera’s assistant, a job that gains him nothing but disdain and anger from his fellow islanders. Aubrey and Jackson have divorced. Jackson is working on a book — “The Immortal Witch” about the Ynaa and about his unique theory that Mera didn’t actually arrive with them but has been on Earth for centuries, while Aubrey is in a relationship with another woman, something she is still feeling her way through (as is Jackson). As the book moves forward, more voices enter the narrative, including those affected sharply by some of the Ynaa killings, and we —and the characters — get the sense that things are inevitably hurtling toward a major confrontation.

Jackson’s theory about Mera turns out to be correct, and Turnbull uses the fact that she’s lived as a scout on Earth for so long to present some harrowingly powerful flashback scenes involving the brutal treatment of the islanders by the Europeans and a slave revolt. There is, of course, a clear connection being drawn here between the utterly remorseless violence the Ynaa inflict on the islanders (there is no difference as we’re shown in the Ynaa mind between tearing a dog in half and tearing a human in half) and the brutality of the European slavers. And the same holds for how the world turned a blind eye to slavery because of the benefits it brought (cheap goods, etc.) them just as the modern world turns a blind eye to events on the island because of all the medical, technological advances they gain from the Ynaa.

But Turnbull is interested in more than a simplistic, didactic “slavery bad, colonialism bad” statement. Or even the much more timely criticism of white privilege, as in the description by one of the islanders of a Ynaa:

He recognized the expression on her face … Tranquility. Not a care in the world. The Ynaa was certain that nothing could touch her. How wonderful it must be to float through the world with all that certainty, knowing you could do anything, and it wouldn’t come back to you. How wonderful it must be to feel safe.
For one, he begins the invasions of the islands not with the Europeans but with the Ciboney, who had landed 500 years earlier on the islands, driven out by the Arwaks, who were themselves raided by the Caribs. And when the slave revolt takes place, it isn’t centered simply on the idea of “freedom,” but is driven by a hierarchal sense of loyalty to kings and is horrifically violent in the presented details, as when a mother is “hacked to death” and her newborn killed in terrible fashion. All of this somewhat complicates the anti-colonial reading and broadens it into a wider exploration of power and resistance. Similarly, Turnbull isn’t interested in stacking the deck for the human rebels whose ranks include more than a few flawed characters and whose violence is not presented as wholly innocent, as purely cleansed via justification over the Ynaa killings of islanders. Violence, social violence in particular, and resistance justified by the acts of oppressors are always complicated creations and actions and Turnbull doesn’t shy away from that, presenting us a much more subtle, much more thoughtful examination.

This is certainly the strong point of The Lesson, and while the writing is mostly smooth and often offers up some wonderful writing on a line by line basis, the novel isn’t without some issues. While I liked that we met the characters a bit before the first contact, and then jumped ahead five years of time to the impact, that first section of the novel felt tonally/stylistically different in that I felt I was reading a YA novel (much of it was focused on the relationship between Derrick and Patrice). The gradual widening of the novel into more POVs was effective in showing us a variety of responses to the Ynaa (and the underlying meaning they represent) and the violence, but the execution wasn’t quite smooth. Some shifts felt abrupt, some of the balance felt off, and I wanted to spend more time with some of the major characters whose presence in the novel was diminished by the other POVs. Here, I didn’t want fewer POVs but did want a longer book (something I don’t normal wish for in a review) so as to give space for these characters to breath and become fully fleshed out a bit more. Similarly, two subplots involving a pregnancy and a cancer could have done with more time. Finally, more pages would have allowed Turnbull to give us more context regarding the alien impact and the world’s response beyond the islands. I didn’t need a lot, but that bit of world-building felt very thin.

These are definite flaws, as noted, but I’ll happily take a book that explores complicated topics in a manner worthy of that complexity and that has me asking for more words rather than fewer. And I’ll certainly be interested in seeing what Turnbull does next.

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This book was a super fun read, and full of culture and character—add to your “to be read” list now! There’s a reason tons of people are talking about this book, and rising star, Cadwell Turnbull. Sci-fi fanatics, here’s your next read!

“An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years the people of the US Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of superadvanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders and a peace that cannot last.

A year after the death of a young boy at the hands of an Ynaa, three families find themselves at the center of the inevitable conflict, witness and victim to events that will touch everyone and teach a terrible lesson.“

In a nutshell: I was a fan. You could FEEL the islander/Ynaa tension; I was on edge waiting for the inevitable combustion. Turnbull feeds us pieces of the puzzle throughout, and leaves the reader hungry for the answer: why are they here? What do they want? The story ramps up rapidly until a powerful conclusion.

I’m a big fan of narratives that peek into the unknown—the possibility of life elsewhere in our universe, and what that could mean for us. But Turnbull gives such a fresh spin to this topic; the setting and the characters are so fresh, and the core of the story is unique as well.

Definitely recommend for sci-fi lovers!

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