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| (Cover Designer: Adam Auerbach) |
I have a review of Adam Oyebanji's novel, Esperance, out in the most recent issue of Strange Horizons, which can be read at this link. Oyebanji's first novel, Braking Day, was a book which I was lucky enough to review for Strange Horizons back in 2023, and it was exciting to have the opportunity to return to this author's work and discuss what ultimately turned out to be a very different narrative.
While Braking Day was a hard SF space opera that dealt with the social upheaval experienced by the crew of a decaying generational starship, Esperance is more of a surrealist modern-day crime thriller with sci-fi elements. The book's plot in part follows a police detective named Ethan Krol who, as the story opens, is assigned the task of investigating a bizarre murder in which a father and son died after their apartment mysteriously flooded with seawater. Concurrent to this story is what at first seems an unrelated narrative following an enigmatic woman named Abi Eniola, who as her half of the novel begins has set out on a personal quest to track down the distant descendants of a sailing ship called "Esperance." Of course, as both stories progress, either narratives begin drawing together.
Ultimately, I felt that Esperance was doing some really fascinating things in terms of story structure. While the book starts out as a relatively simple iteration of a police procedural--a story in which Ethan moves from one location to another while gathering clues in his investigation--as the narrative develops, the true motivations of both Ethan and Abi grow increasingly ambiguous. In Ethan's case, as he fixates on a potential suspect in his murder investigation, his actions simultaneously reveal an anti-black racism which he, as a white police officer, is refusing to interrogate within himself. Likewise, Abi's story takes on its own level of uncertainty, with odd details about Abi's actions and motivations leading the reader to wonder if this woman might perhaps be the killer for whom Ethan is searching, or if our perceptions of her story are merely just as constrained and limited as Ethan's.
An excerpt from my review is below:
Something I started thinking about while reading the early chapters of Adam Oyebanji’s novel Esperance was the extent to which this book’s story doesn’t seem like it should work, even when in practice it does. Initially, Esperance frames itself as a very straightforward murder mystery set in contemporary Chicago, with the plot following a detective, Ethan Krol, who is tasked with investigating a bizarre series of killings that seem to defy logical explanation. Over the course of this narrative, each step in Ethan’s investigation demonstrates a simple fact that he initially refuses to accept—that the crime he is investigating can only be explained via supernatural means.
The full review which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be read here.