“Assume I’m dead by the time you read this”
“Who am I? I won’t tell you. But you can call me Jane Smith.”
I was immediately compelled to jump into this story. Such a curious beginning, I had to know what was going on. Then the book comes to a grinding halt.
So this book was about a woman who works in a security tech company that was handed a note which lead her to a storage room that just had a hummingbird in it. Supposedly it was placed there by a woman who was an Eco terrorist.
But this was an interesting premise, Jane Smith practically abandons her life to pursue a random mystery. I had to keep reading now matter slow it was. I should have stopped.
Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review

I received a free electronic copy of this environmental novel from Netgalley, Jeff VanderMeer, and MCD, publisher. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. VanderMeer writes an intricately plotted mystery with larger-than-life protagonists, both very good and very bad and occasionally half crazy, and lots of blood, sweat, and tears. The slow degradation of the world, only slightly exaggerated for our times, will give you too much to think about but you won't be able to forget it, either. It's a story I hope everyone takes to heart.

I have a 60-year relationship with tree huggers around the world. Hummingbird Salamander takes all those life-long fears and expands them a little, adds a touch of exaggeration, and what transpires should scare you to death. That said, I spent a great deal of the first half of this novel flipping back to see what I missed. There are several places that are a bit disjointed. Once you quit trying to make the story flow it overtakes you completely and the next thing you know it's the end. A very good book.

Astonishing book. It started out feeling very different from other novels by Vandermeer: more noir-esque in some ways, however cli-fi remained ever present in the background and then the fore-ground. I would not really classify this novel as New Weird however.
Regardless, this is an astonishingly touching and beautifully crafted story. Some of Vandermeer's previous novels can be so bizarre and ambiguous but this novel has a beautiful arc. Highly recommend it.

Well, I have all the thoughts about this book. Let's see if I can put them in some coherent order.

Oddly, I didn't really enjoy reading this book, and yet I plowed through it, which indicates that on some level I DID. It's strange, methodical, a bit depressing (humanity sucks), and intriguing. It's almost like a fever dream--extremely thorough and detailed, but not necessarily a tale you could (or would want to) describe in detail to others. I think it will likely deeply divide readers.

Normally I like VanderMeer's style of writing, but this book felt a little off for me, pacing-wise. I remember noting that nothing had really happened to build momentum in the plot up until the 35% mark on my Kindle. Until that point, there was a lot of foreboding and an enormous amounts of data dumping and internal processing about a mystery either you'll get on board with or won't. For the first quarter, I wasn't sure which choice I would make.

For much of the first half of the book, one may wonder if the whole mystery of the hummingbird and salamander is merely a glitch in the brain of our hero. Is any of this even real? The lack of detail about setting/time makes it easy to be as lost as she is. (It's only minor spoiler-y to tell you that, indeed, this mystery is legit. Keep reading, you'll eventually get answers, but they'll be sloooooow in coming. I'm not even sure they'll be entirely satisfying to you. See what I mean about this being a hard book to review?)

I think what kept me coming back for more...for hours...was our hero 'Jane.' Humanely and deeply rendered, an odd duck forced into an odd situation with her giant body, quick brain, internal and external weapons, and trusty purse, Shovel Pig, I've never quite met a character like her before in a story. I didn't always get her choices, nor did I agree with them (she leaves A TON of collateral damage in her wake that make me question all of her intimate relationships), but I guess I was interested in reading about them.

I look forward to reading others' reviews about this book. I'm sure some will say it's a masterpiece. I'm not sure I would go that far (I enjoyed reading the Southern Reach trilogy more). However, I keep coming back to the fact that I read it hard and fast even with all my issues with it. And, like the Reach trilogy, some of the ideas and imagery will probably stick with me for a long time. I'm not sure that's the sign of a masterpiece, but there is something strange about this book that makes it special.

Thanks to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book lacked the excitement and paced storytelling that Annihilation drew me into.

Hummingbird Salamander seemed more along the pace of Dead Astronauts. I found it a bit dry and boring. But then again, every time I got a bit bored with it, something mildly interesting happened. It seemed a very long read.

Spiraling into Hummingbird Salamander from the moment it begins, the novel unfolds in fragments, increasingly deeper and darker and clearer. The plummet is both exhausting and invigorating. The story peels away at itself (...metamorphosing?... expiring?) until nothing is as it was, and yet, everything is. 

Hummingbird Salamander is the account of "Jane Smith," an anonymous woman who works somewhere within the bounds of cyber "security" (the branch rather familiar with surreptitious affairs and clients). Given a note and a key to a storage unit, Jane finds herself lured by the mystery that presents itself there: a taxidermied hummingbird and traces of the woman who had brought her there: Silvina Vilcapampa. She falls into a chase of Silvina, relinquishing everything in the pursuit of this message that Silvina clearly wants her to hear. Submerged into a dangerous complexity built of the interplays between impeding environmental doom, crime, and the human desire for power (or success, or control), Jane is pulled into the center of an obscure entanglement surrounding Silvina. 

VanderMeer, once again, centralizes environmental issues. This novel is absolutely relevant to today. Hummingbird Salamander could be happening now, it could be happening just a few years in the future — pandemics & masks, fracturing politics, disasters, the complications of tech and social media... It's a familiar world. And yet, it's important to the narrative that it is also unfamiliar, that Jane is (and we are) led to see the world differently as everything changes. The novel begins with the quote, "I'm here to show you how the world ends." And in a way, this is true. We watch the world Jane knew unravel as the story unfolds. But somehow, it is not all depressing. 
Something that surprised me was the amount of violence in the novel. There is a constant focus, not quite a glorification, on guns, bombs, terrorism, murders... resorting to violence. I found myself pulled away, especially when trying to reconcile it to the discussion of unnecessary extinctions, of unnecessary deaths in the environment. It was harder for me to get through those parts, trying to work out what the message was there. 
If you're looking for characters to like, you probably won't find it in this book. However, the characters are all whole, entire to themselves. It's an interesting look at different human intentions and choices. 
The storytelling is skillful. Even when the content is draining, you are pushed along quickly. All the pieces are constantly being woven together — things that you had almost forgotten coming back to bring a new revelation. The mystery wraps around itself, cleverly reveals itself in bits. An ever-present sense of unknowing is necessary, because our MC has subsided into the unfamiliar. 
After the fatigue of the narrative, the ending is not really a light. But it is a release, a completion. Maybe it was exhaustion from all that the book had raised, but the last bits left me on the verge of tears. Not sad, not happy, but something meaningful. 

CW: Domestic abuse, child abuse, death/murder. 

Thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for providing an ARC in return for an honest review.

“Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending me an ARC of Hummingbird Salamander in exchange for an honest review. I feel conflicted about posting such a negative review for a book I received as an ARC, but honest means honest, and I had a lot of problems with this novel.

The main character, who calls herself “Jane,” receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a stuffed hummingbird and the thinnest of clues about the location of a missing reputed eco-terrorist, Silvina Vilcapampa. Jane doesn’t know Silvina, so I feel like any rational person’s reaction would be “that’s weird, but whatever, I’m going to go back home to my spouse and daughter.” Instead, Jane literally throws her entire life away—her job, husband, daughter, even her personal safety—to search for a stranger. And there’s no explanation for why Jane would make such a mind-boggling choice.

Jane is a difficult narrator. She’s very cryptic, and it’s hard to connect with a narrator who is keeping so many secrets from the reader. She seems wildly paranoid, though I guess you’re not actually paranoid if they really are out to get you. It’s a combination that adds up to a person whose mind you don’t want to inhabit for an entire novel. Most of all, though, she’s a relentlessly unlikeable character. Her treatment of her husband and daughter is stunningly callous, and she knowingly places multiple other people in mortal danger without even so much as a warning.

I also had a number of problems with the story being told. There’s less plot here than I expected, and often the story advances only because Jane makes some leap of logic or jumps to a conclusion without evidence. The cast of characters is rather confusing, and the reader never really knows what has happened to many of them, an absence of closure that seemed deliberate but is still frustrating. It is only in the final pages that the reader begins to get answers about what may have set this story in motion, and at least for me, the answers came too late and were not that satisfying.

I also feel that Hummingbird Salamander fell far short of the description: a speculative, tightly plotted thriller about endangered species, climate change, identity, the world we live in, and the possible end of all things. I did not get any of that here. Tightly plotted is subjective. But most of the discussion of endangered species was about the stuffed hummingbird and salamander themselves. I have no idea how this book was about identity, especially as “Jane” makes clear that nearly all the names she uses are fake. And the rest—climate change, the world we live in, and the possible end of all things—are just obliquely hinted at with passing references to future problems, or a failed attempt to build an ecologically sustainable community.

There are quotations within the novel (and discussions in other reviews) that make me wonder if the message here is supposed to be about the length regular people will be required to go to combat climate change and ecological destruction. First, if that’s the case, it’s buried pretty deep. Second, it’s a demoralizing message because it’s a completely unrealistic idea. Almost no one will go to the absurd lengths Jane goes to in this novel; people generally would not consider abandoning their family and living off the grid to be a life worth living. Finally, and maybe most importantly, there are any number of studies have debunked this idea that significant personal sacrifice is what it will take to combat climate change and ecological destruction. Corporate, industrial pollution is the primary source of the problem and will control what happens in the future, regardless of whether or not I personally recycle or reduce my carbon footprint.

Jeff VanderMeer is an author I’ve wanted to read, but hadn’t gotten around to yet. So when Hummingbird Salamander came up on NetGalley, I thought “great, I’ll finally give him a try.” It made sense at the time, but was a mistake in hindsight, because I don’t know if my issues are limited to this novel or if Mr. VanderMeer is just not my cup of tea. I need some people who have read Mr. Vandermeer’s more popular works, particularly his Southern Reach trilogy, to read this one and then weigh in: is this book different enough from his others that I should still try Annihilation, or is this book similar enough that I would just be in for another frustrating read?

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an honest review of this ARC. I love VanderMeer. Really, I do. I gobbled up the Southern Reach trilogy; I bawled over Borne. I have his amazing book on writing. So I fully expected to love this book with every fiber of my being. Yet, I did not.
Essentially, we follow "Jane," our statuesque, muscular heroine as she goes down the rabbit hole of eco-conspiracy theories. One day, as she's leaving a coffee shop, the barista runs after her with a mysterious note. This note leads her to a taxidermied, extinct hummingbird. And after that, things get really real. She's followed, she's threatened, she's armed. Her life gets topsy-turvy and out of her control completely. And all because of a dead bird. And maybe a salamander, if she can find it.

The focus of her quest is one Silvina Vilcapampa, supposed eco-terrorist and daughter of an evil industrialist who traffics in rare animals. Silvina is supposedly dead when the story starts, but so many things don't add up for Jane. As she hunts down anyone connected to Silvina and the bird, she is further embroiled in a strange conspiracy that has ties to her childhood. And nothing, including what she thought of Silvina, is reliable.

I went into this book so excited for everything in it. But the writing was not up to the standard to which I'm accustomed with Vandermeer. He constructs beautiful sentences into weird, lovely, tragic tales. This had very little of that. It felt like he dialed it in, or rushed to meet a deadline. Jane is never as engaging like Ghost Bird or Borne or Rachel or even the Psychologist. She's a mess of a person, which is fine. But she just lacks that extra something. And the things that happen don't entirely make sense. I've read two books in which heroes hide in piles of slain animal grue in the last few weeks, and this one just didn't quite make sense. Jane engenders a disconnect from the reader. It isn't a case of likeable or unlikeable. It's a case of, "I don't really care about her."

I kept waiting to love this book, and I kept being disappointed. It felt like a thriller, but weirder. But not as charmingly Weird as Vandermeer's other books. And, at times, it was almost nonsensical, but not in the giant bear fights sentient alien plant way.

And then the end, Which I realize some people didn't like. But, for me, it kept the book at three stars. The end isn't satisfying; it doesn't need to be. It needs to have impact, which it did. Nothing is what Jane expected, nor what I expected. And the not knowing is tragic and hopeful and beautiful.

First things first, the cover is gorgeous!

"Jane Smith" receives a taxidermied hummingbird along with clues which lead her to a taxidermied salamander. This is where readers might be thinking "what???" I know I was. Hmmm, why was Jane Smith chosen to receive these items and go on the hunt. Silvana, a reputed deceased ecoterrorist left her the note that started Jane Smith on this journey. Taking the Hummingbird from the storage unit triggers events which leave Jane and her family in danger.

An interesting concept which started strongly for me but then became a struggle. Initially I found it to be weird, confusing and wondered what the heck was going on just like Jane Smith in this book. But in the beginning chapters this book had something which grabbed me and made me want to keep reading to find out what was going to happen. But then it became a real struggle. This book is about endangered species, conspiracies, eco-terrorism. At heart this is a sci-fi mystery. I am hit or miss with science fiction so perhaps I was not the best reader for this book. I do not mind being in the dark, this often sparks my curiosity but along the way I got lost while reading this book.

Jane herself, is infesting in that she is an odd lady. She is a former wrestler and physically intimidating. She towers over most people and her personality is lacking. Honestly, for most of the book, I did not know what to make of her. But she is smart, tough, but remained somewhat flat for me.

I must give this book props for originality and not spoon feeding the reader. For most of the book, I was in the dark. Reading this book was like trying to put the pieces of a 1000-piece puzzle together. Another positive of this book is the brilliant writing.

While many are loving this book, it just did not quite work for me. I am sitting out in outlier field on this one. Read the reviews of others who are enjoying this much more than I did.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/MCD and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

I received an eARC copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I’ll be honest, this review was going to be more like a 3 star until I sat and digested the novel for 24 hours. This one, as Troy would say, wrinkled my brain.

For the first 150 pages, I was so confused and lost as to why the narrator even cared about the mystery of Silvina. It was long and boring and I could not concentrate on the story because I wasn’t sure why I cared. The last half of the book, however, not only answered most of those questions, but made me aware of why I disliked the first half of the book so much!

With most books, authors create a main character or narrator the reader can relate to. In this book, however, I found myself disliking the narrator more and more as the story continued. When I hit the halfway point and more towards the end, I understood why. The author really pushed this book and this narrator I could not connect with, and created an interesting and still confusing story.

I found this to not be my favorite book by Jeff VanderMeer, however, still worth a read if you like mystery/thrillers and brutally honest scenarios.

This was good but not my favorite. The plot twist ending didn’t grab me the way I was hoping it would. I liked the beginning a lot. It really grabbed me. I also liked the way the main character was written. Just the last few chapters let me down a little.

When security tech "Jane" is given a note that leads her to a storage locker containing a taxidermic hummingbird, she finds herself involved in a bioterrorism scheme that forces her to revisit her past.

This novel was the least sci-fi of any of VanderMeer's previous novels that I have read. I am not what I would call a "sci fi fan" by any means, so I anticipated I'd find this book to be the most enthralling VanderMeer novel to date. Quite the opposite proved to be true. Jane's narration is very stilted, jumbled, stream-of-consciousness like. I found it hard to concentrate for more than a few pages at a time and had a difficult time connecting to Jane as a character as well. I also didn't find what was so appealing and magical about Silvina. These qualities about her that Jane seemed to be so enamored with just never came through to me. I read through to the end, hoping the conclusion would be a little more exciting and would "wow" me in some unexpected way. Unfortunately, I found the conclusion to be just as dry and drawn out as the rest of the novel. I am disappointed <u>Hummingbird Salamander</u> just didn't work out for me, but would recommend the Southern Reach trilogy or the Borne books to those that have not read any of VanderMeer's previous works.

From the author of The Southern Reach series come a new thriller! I was a huge fan of the trilogy so I was so excited to read this latest from Jeff VanderMeer. However, if you were expecting a mysterious, sci-fi thriller you will be disappointed. This is more of an eco-thriller, set in the modern world and based on reality.

Part 1 was a slow and confusing start. We meet "Jane", who is pretty much a selfish human being. She doesn't seem to give two hoots about her coworkers, her husband, or even her daughter. She's a damaged woman (who isn't) but has built up so many walls and pushed so many people who care about her away, keeping them at an arms length and not caring about how her actions will effect them. She was completely unrelatable, and I found it hard to get into the story because I truly didn't care about the character one way or the other. The only mystery that kept me reading was finding out who Silvina was and why she left taxidermy animals to Jane after her death. Part 1 was filled with long ramblings of Jane's backstory that seemed to have no relevance to the current story. I skimmed some paragraphs and kept pressing on.

Part 2 is where the story finally got me hooked! It took a few days to get through Part 1, and it took all of 3 hours to get me through Part 2- that's how good it got! There are people after Jane. Bad people, but figuring out who they work for and why they are chasing her is the mystery. Jane starts investigating the places in Silvina's world, her apartment, her commune, and how close she was to her family who are part of a powerful criminal empire. Was Silvina, the eco-terrorist with a good heart, involved in highly illegal activity? Did she sacrifice her beliefs in the name of money? What was her end goal? Was her death truly and accident or was she murdered?

Part 3 was good at the start, but the ending got weird. The novel seemed to go from reality to a sci-fi dystopian world and the jump from reality to this crazy fiction came fast and without warning. It left me confused and flipping back pages, wondering if I missed something important. The end-end was less than satisfying and I felt a huge let down as everything tied together and came to a close.

I am glad I read this novel and I can honestly say I did enjoy the read. It was a 3 star read for me.

"Hummingbird Salamander" is set to be released here in the U.S. on April 6, 2021. Pre-order your copy now!

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for allowing me an advanced digital copy to read and give my honest review.

Happy Reading!

I received a digital advance copy of Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer through NetGalley. Hummingbird Salamander is scheduled for release on April 6, 2021.

Hummingbird Salamander follows Jane (though I doubt that is her real name), a woman who works in cyber security as she receives a mysterious note, then a key, then a taxidermied hummingbird. Jane quickly becomes obsessed with the woman the clues seem to be leading her to, and willing to sacrifice everything in her quest to find her.

As a character, Jane is very anonymous. I struggled throughout the story to figure out who she was and what was driving her forward. Upon receiving the initial mysterious note from a stranger, Jane quickly moves onto the trail it points to, even without any clear connection between Jane, the note, and the stranger. Jane quickly abandons her job, her spouse, even her daughter to continue her hunt for the stranger. Given no connection between Jane and the stranger, I didn’t understand the choices she made or her willingness to drop everything and everyone to follow the trail of the hummingbird. As the novel progressed, this became more pronounced, with Jane becoming less and less defined as a person. By the end, Jane was a blank for me, a character with no definition or boundaries. I do wonder if this was intentional by VanderMeer, but remain uncertain what the purpose of this ambiguity might have been.

I was also uncertain as to the time of this novel. Initially, I thought we were in present(ish) day. Scattered references to the start of a pandemic made me believe the novel began in 2019. As the book progressed, and the story made jumps forward in time, I became less certain about this timeline. VanderMeer introduces events and progressions that don’t seem to fit as a continuation of our time. There were also references to technology that I am not sure actually exists. I was uncertain throughout if we were in an alternate reality, the near future, or the far future.

The combination of an ambiguous main character and an uncertain timeline made it progressively difficult to stay invested in the story. This was very unfortunate, as this story had very important things to say about wildlife trafficking, human impact on the environment, and how the changes we make to ecosystems may play out for us.

I am very interested to see what other readers thought of Hummingbird Salamander. While I found the lack of clarity of character and time to be a challenge, this may land differently with other readers.

Hummingbird Salamander from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“A volcano that seems forever to erupt but never erupts. The one day it does. And the surprise is not the explosion but the aftershock.”

I have read two Jeff Vandermeer novels, Borne and Dead Astronauts. Borne immediately made its way onto my list of top ten favorite novels of all time and Dead Astronauts did not (I have such complicated feelings about it and how vividly weird it is though, i know that it is a book that will live on in my memory forever even when what plot it managed fades completely. Dead Astronauts is an Experience more than it is a story) So I come into this new book with no idea where to place my expectations. Will I meet a new favorite? Will I be shuffled along the weirdest rollercoaster ride? Who knows. Certainly not me.

The thing he does extremely well is the way he paints scenery in a way that evokes so much more emotion than a landscape or old building might reasonably be expected to evoke. For example:“Anything could exist in the thick mist that covered the mountainside. A vast forest. A tech bro campus. But most likely a sad logged slope, a hell of old-growth stumps and gravel the farther up you went.” A hell of old growth stumps. So barren, in a way that makes a sad mundane scene gain a haunting power, marked by the violence of the stumps as monuments to the old growth that once was.

But another thing he does so very well is showcased in one off lines that give a twist of horror and magical realism to daily life. Like: “The barista retreating into the coffee shop sudden, like a monster grabbed him in its jaws and pulled him back inside.” (I gotta say that sentence gave me big Magnus Archives/anglerfish vibes, but also like, that is such a great image. So awful AND mundane. Is it paranoia? Or does this world really just work that way? It takes a while to decide). Or when our protagonist beats up a man who had been following her, only to notice as he walked away that she’d “torn his suit in the back. The white shirt beneath protruded like the inside of a stuffed animal.”

I strongly suspect that this is a book that people will either love or find frustrating. Our narrator, whose name probably isn’t “Jane,” is extremely unreliable, preoccupied with the idea of carefully choosing what you reveal and what you don’t...and so, the plot moves forward in jumps and starts that leave you wondering if her paranoia is helping her leap to incredible insights and to find obscure clues or if she’s leaving out too much information. It’s hard to follow her logic most of the time, if you try to trace it and anticipate the steps; it works better if you let her pull you along behind her.

In a softer tone, but matching aesthetic in re extinction, I would recommend that any readers who enjoy this book also listen to the song “Deuteronomy 2:10” by The Mountain Goats.

As an aside, this book is an odd one to read so soon after I finished <i>Broken (On the Best Possible Way)<i/> by Jenny Lawson, given that author’s overly fond relationship with unusual novelty taxidermy and this book’s absolute horror at the entire concept of taxidermy and the violence inherent in the concept. The two viewpoints could not be further apart.

Interestingly, there is a pandemic at play in this book, or at least a pandemic is occasionally referenced. This vague pandemic lays uncomfortably in the background, as if it doesn’t quite fit its surroundings. Given the release date, I can’t entirely decide whether this was a part of the plot prior to The Current Situation and therefore doesn’t have today’s insights into what a pandemic really looks like, or if Covid-19 inspired its addition to the existing text and therefore the idea was added in during editing. It doesn’t quite have the organic feel of the rest of the plot or the all consuming focus that have overtaken most of our daily lives for the past year, but it does lead to a sense of creeping dread every time it is mentioned, feeling like a Sword of Damocles, ready to drop at any moment and swaying with small but too familiar observations: “A surgical mask hung slack around her neck, like the chain had issued them but hadn’t told employees it was mandatory yet. Like most places.”

Anyways. This is a weird one. If you are a fan of the Weird or really enjoy eco horror or conspiracy theories, this will fit the bill perfectly, and a portion of profits will go towards conservation efforts, which is lovely.

“We’re ghosts trapped in the wreckage of our systems. So why shouldn’t we haunt them?”

The premise and synopsis of this novel sounded intriguing. Who doesn't love mystery, ecology, the future of nature? Sadly, none of this came to fruition in this book.

The heroine is only revealed to the reader in disjointed, jumbled sentences and paragraphs, if you can even call them paragraphs. More like staccato sentences of few words and many periods. The first paragraph holds a perfect preview of how the whole book reads: "Who am I? I won't tell you. Exactly. But you can call me Jane. Jane Smith. If that helps. "

No, Jane, it didn't help at all and it doesn't get any better. I found my mind wandering to my grocery list more times than I can remember. I found myself drooling as I woke up, having fallen asleep mid-sentence.

I don't know how else to put this: this book was so excruciatingly boring. I skipped to the middle to see if it possibly picked up, maybe with more dialog between characters instead of the constant drone of sterile prose. It did not: "The laptop was set on the stool, and I could see a face in motion across the screen. A familiar face. Older than his photographs. White hair and a white beard."

Still with the short, choppy sentences, no flowing, rhythmic river of flowing words. Just short. Angry. Prose.

I jumped to the end, hoping against hope that by then the author had changed his mind, had realized this herky jerky way of writing was hard to read. I was wrong: " I've been stared at my whole life. What is a little more of that? This beating of my heart. For now. the pity of it"s that I may not know what happens next. Or even recognize it. And that, perhaps, after all that has happened, I don't deserve to. But you might."

I don't know what happened earlier in the book, and even after reading snippets in the middle and the end, I just didn't care.

I did not finish this novel. It's sitting at 18% read. I kept telling myself I'd go back to it, but I just haven't managed to. The premise sounds completely gripping and interesting, but the novel itself falls far short of holding my attention. The first chapter or two had me interested, but then completely lost me.

The protagonist was frightfully dull and boring. I wouldn't care if I liked her or not, but the dullness...ah no. The MC was immediately worried about people watching or following her without little cause, and that didn't seem reasonable to me. I understand that the author tried to use her career as the reason she'd be far more cautious than the average person. However, the way it was written just didn't work for me.

For as "far" as I read, there was too little of interest to make the stretches of info dumps and world building hold any attention themselves. I finally realized I just do not care how the book ends to push through to each little section of actual content.

When I read the description for this book, I was very intrigued. I felt sure it would be an important work of fiction, relevant to today’s world and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, the plot gets bogged down with chunks of detail that do not move the story forward, I am a reader who enjoys reading every word and journeying with the author to the ending. I admit that I found myself skimming over pages of the narrative so that I could better follow the plot. I understand that the author intended the story to be complex, but I do not think he was successful. The characters seemed very flat, even the main character did not have that element of believability, that makes a character memorable. The author’s message about environmental issues is not always clear, although if his intent was to mirror the confusing times that we live in today, he was successful.

3.5: "Who am I? I won't tell you. Exactly.
But you can call me Jane.
Jane Smith. If that helps.
I'm here to show you how the world ends."

So ends the first chapter of Jeff VanderMeer's haunting and sometimes frustrating, Hummingbird Salamander. As a fan of The Southern Reach trilogy (and Annihilation in particular), I was so excited when I was given the opportunity to read this. From the beginning, you are sucked into the mystery surrounding "security analyst" "Jane Smith" (the quotations are deliberately annoying and cryptic) as she leads you through the way her life fell apart and how the world ended. The dialogue is stilted in a way I have come to expect from VanderMeer and it can be frustrating. The narrator gives everyone fake names that are real to you and contradicts herself a lot. (It is her last airplane ride but then it isn't. She doesn't like her assistant Allie but then she does).

Jane is handed a note one day from a barista at her local coffee shop and begins her journey that involves taxidermy, bioterrorism research, danger and deliberately imploding aspects of her life in a way that may leave you somewhat irritated. The story is also speckled throughout with anecdotes from an abusive past on the family farm and will likely leave you as curious as me as to how her journey ends and what exactly happened to the family she left behind (families?).

The story is deliberately frustrating and I can easily see how it might leave readers cold. The main character makes many mistakes and frequently pauses to ask why she is even doing this and as engaged as I was in her journey I can't say that I was completely satisfied by the results. Fans of Annihilation might be disappointed if they come into this book expecting the same walloping story but I think it is worth reading if you like how that story unfolded. VanderMeer writes in a unique way that I find both frustrating and engrossing. The story is mostly smart and engaging but reader beware if you are looking for an escape from pandemic literature. You won't find that here.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

(Instagram review to come)

For someone who doesn't read dystopian by choice, I find myself picking it up more and more lately, and when it's as well written and immersive as this latest by Jeff VanderMeer, finding it rewarding and thought provoking as well as chilling. Others have called this an eco-thriller, which describes it to a tee. VanderMeer creates characters that have intriguing backstories, and "Jane Smith" is one of his best. A true original. He also has a fine hand in describing action sequences, and as "Jane" navigates her way through her twisting search for a truth, the reader finds themself learning as well. Haunting and chilling at the same time.