Tade Thompson’s Rosewater is the start of an award-winning, cutting edge trilogy set in Nigeria, by one of science fiction’s most engaging new voices.

Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.

Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.

Rosewater is set in Nigeria, in the 2050s and 2060s. It follows a sensitive, a man who can connect to the xenosphere and read others’ thoughts as a consequence of aliens showing up. There’s a lot going on in this novel, and I kinda wish I had not gone for an audiobook, because chapters and interludes frequently jump from past to present, and it wasn’t always easy to follow along.

I found the setting really interesting, there are a lot of mysteries in the post-alien-contact world. The protagonist knew a lot more than he was letting on, and this information was only revealed to the reader through flashbacks through the book. This was an aspect I really enjoyed as a storytelling method, but also something I found pretty annoying to keep track of in audio. Despite him mentioning it from the beginning, it was still kinda weird how Kaaro knew the answers to a lot of my big questions all along, especially those about the huge alien dome in the middle of the city. It worked great to keep me interested.

I know next to nothing about Nigeria, but it was great seeing aliens settle somewhere outside the US/UK. The way the sensitives were employed by private companies and the government was also creative, I was a big fan of Kaaro’s day job. I also liked his dual life, a boring bank job and working for a secret government agency. Add to that all that’s gone on in his past, and his life in the xenosphere, a sort of realm that mind-readers can access, and I’m surprised he can manage to keep it all straight.

I’m not in a good place atm for reading morally grey protagonists, and Kaaro, who started life as a thief and continued by being horny for every woman (maybe not every every, but very many) is not exactly a darling. But, though he’s not ending up on any of my favorites lists, he was still fun to read about, he’s definitely got some kind of charm. For one thing, I love his voice, both in the writing sense and the actual narrator, and I loved how the other characters often called out his shit. I’ve listened to a few books since, but I can still hear Kaaro’s voice perfectly just thinking of this book.

The plot was where I didn’t mesh so well with the book. I think it’s on me, I’m all kinds of mess this year, but I just kept getting lost between past, present and past interludes, to the point that I just gave up trying to figure out anything and rolled with it. Nevertheless, the audioboook itself was great, so if you haven’t got attention issues it might still be worth going for that over the print.

I’ll probably continue the series, there are a lot of mysteries I’d still like to learn about, and I think there will be more PoV characters in the following books.

Goodreads

r/fantasy bingo:I think some people are using it for Color in the Title, Big Dumb Object, Audiobook

Tarot Black Lives Matter bingo:WORLD: set in a country that’s not your own (depending on where you live of course)