The other day I finished On the edge of gone by Corinne Dyuvis and it’s a book I enjoyed immensely and I’m sure, will stay with me for a long time.
I will add the blurp because it summarizes the book perfectly:
January 29, 2035.
That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one. Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter near their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.
Then a last-minute encounter leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship that’s scheduled to leave Earth behind and colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But each passenger must have a practical skill to contribute. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?
When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?
Let’s start by saying that for those seeking a space-opera or an action-packed adventure in space or on Earth, this isn’t the right book for you.
The story opens twenty minutes before the comet’s impact on earth, and goes on while everything is, actually, falling apart. It treads the line between what was and what will be, by making the right now collapse around the people still alive to see it.
In the middle of this, it’s Denise*, an autistic biracial girl who loves, loves loves loves cats and adores her sister Iris, with her white mother who is a drug addict.
The questions raised in this book are thought provoking in today’s society where proving our worth is inseparably linked with the work we do. Denise, throughout this story, is told again and again that her life’s value only measures in the work she can produce. And she fights against it with her choices. I think this is the reason Denise, as a character, is so compelling. In a world where people’s dead bodies float around, she has an actual chance of survival right between her hands and people tell her she can’t have it because she isn’t a prodigy or she doesn’t have a spectacular talent to contribute in the ship. And Denise is having none of it. She is determined to save her family and, in the process, she learns how to protect and take care of herself as well.
“Whether someone is useful only matters if you value people by their use.”
The story is fast-paced for the biggest part of the book, Denise’s voice is wonderful and, personally, I love how realistically and effortlessly diverse this book is.
*Denise is awesome. ?