3.0
The Girl in the Road
ByPublisher Description
A debut that the Los Angeles Times calls “vividly imagined,” The Girl in the Road describes a future that is culturally lush and emotionally wrenching.
Monica Byrne bursts on to the literary scene with an extraordinary vision of the future. In a world where global power has shifted east and revolution is brewing, two women embark on vastly different journeys—each harrowing and urgent and wholly unexpected.
When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her and she must flee India. As she plots her exit, she learns of the Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation. Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, she sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth.
Meanwhile, Mariama, a young girl in Africa, is forced to flee her home. She joins up with a caravan of misfits heading across the Sahara. She is taken in by Yemaya, a beautiful and enigmatic woman who becomes her protector and confidante. They are trying to reach Addis Abba, Ethiopia, a metropolis swirling with radical politics and rich culture. But Mariama will find a city far different than she ever expected—romantic, turbulent, and dangerous.
As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama’s fates are linked in ways that are mysterious and shocking to the core.
Written with stunning clarity, deep emotion, and a futuristic flair, The Girl in the Road is an artistic feat of the first order: vividly imagined, artfully told, and profoundly moving.
Monica Byrne bursts on to the literary scene with an extraordinary vision of the future. In a world where global power has shifted east and revolution is brewing, two women embark on vastly different journeys—each harrowing and urgent and wholly unexpected.
When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her and she must flee India. As she plots her exit, she learns of the Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation. Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, she sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth.
Meanwhile, Mariama, a young girl in Africa, is forced to flee her home. She joins up with a caravan of misfits heading across the Sahara. She is taken in by Yemaya, a beautiful and enigmatic woman who becomes her protector and confidante. They are trying to reach Addis Abba, Ethiopia, a metropolis swirling with radical politics and rich culture. But Mariama will find a city far different than she ever expected—romantic, turbulent, and dangerous.
As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama’s fates are linked in ways that are mysterious and shocking to the core.
Written with stunning clarity, deep emotion, and a futuristic flair, The Girl in the Road is an artistic feat of the first order: vividly imagined, artfully told, and profoundly moving.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities90 Reviews
3.0
Rachel
Created 3 months agoShare
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spacewhombus
Created 7 months agoShare
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“As with https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56304414.The_Actual_Star (quite possibly my favorite fiction book of all time), this author creates world that I absolutely cannot look away from and that stick in my brain for days after reading. I finished this book in a day and was completely lost in the world, which is set in the near future as the world struggles with the climate crisis and the world powers and populations shift. It follows two storylines: Meena, who is walking from Mumbai across an array of wave energy harvesters that make a path through the ocean to Djibouti (called The Trail) and must survive alone on what she brings with her, and Mariama, a lost young girl making her way from Mauritania to Ethiopia with a small group of delivery truck drivers. Both girls in this novel struggle with ghosts of trauma and violence that come to light in the end, and their stories interconnect in a way that some reviewers said was obvious, but I only really figured out as it was happening.
The author describes these places so richly and I found myself googling so much while reading so that I could really get a sense of the places she was describing as Mariama and Meena passed through. The author also lived and traveled in many of these places herself.
This was a very dark book, with a lot of violence and realistic descriptions of survival, and if you are someone who likes stories of survival in the wilderness then you would really find Meena's journey across The Trail interesting. I also had to keep re-evaluating my opinion of both Meena and Mariama as more of their stories came to light, and as we learn that their own narration is not always reliable.
One of my favorite things about this author is how well she imagines and describes the future, in a way that seems perfectly plausible- even with sci-fi tech like transparent camouflage pods that can hang under the ocean to protect Meena from storms at sea, embedded automatic language translation devices, and a travel oven that converts any organic matter to a meal of your choice. She writes in the end that she imagines the future will look remarkably like the world today, rather than some crazy dystopia, and I think that is why it works so well and gets under your skin so deeply. Her worlds exist in the future, yes, but not so far that they are unrecognizable, and the technology, cultures, and politics of these futures are easily imaginable from today's world.
All in all, I expected to adore this and I did! Can't wait to check out more from this author!”
Whitney Holcomb
Created 10 months agoShare
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Stellalune
Created about 1 year agoShare
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Jordyn Walhof
Created about 1 year agoShare
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“This was very strange and distressing... will update if I think that it was good when I can tell”
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