Graft

If you’re looking for an alternate-timeline, imagination-heavy adventure in the genre of science fiction, Graft, by Matt Hill, will meet those needs.

Graft by [Hill, Matt]

In short: an organization makes genetically modified people for all sorts of reasons. Y, our main protagonist, spends much of the chapters from her perspective telling us about the facility where she – and others – are created and trained. But Y is different from the others who are made/grafted/created: she has a necklace with a tooth on it. (That tooth is somewhat explained later, but don’t hold your breath.) Meanwhile, war has pushed people to travel (through time? through shortcut in the universe?) to different places for food. There is no more internet or broccoli; there are no cell phones or pharmacies. Manchester is a war zone: a place where the city council deals as much on the black market as with the government, and where citizens turn football stadiums into shanty towns and have given up on humanity.

In this semi-post-apocalyptic world, Sol and Irish are two friends who will do what is necessary for their own survival. They run a partially legal auto-repair shop, which was originally Sol’s father’s business. I say “partially” because they also steal cars and strip them or parts that they can use or resell from the comfort of their shop.

One day, they’re out looking for cars to be towed (legally, mind you) when Irish spots a Lexus, which are few and far between these days. He just can’t resist the opportunity to take it. After a little spat with the driver, who did not appreciate being evicted from the car, the friends get the Lexus back to their shop and put it aside. Later that evening, Sol takes a closer look at the car and finds a woman bound in the trunk: she is very modified, but is very much alive.

Although is isn’t quite sure what to do, Sol is determined for some reason to help the woman, who we come to know is Y. She has three arms, one of which has been grafted on, her lips are stapled shut, and there are other obvious body modifications. His ex-wife is dealing with her own modified “helper” that someone dropped off at her business, and she is unwilling to even consider the idea of helping Sol with his own modified human. When a thug-for-hire named Roy shows up and is interested in buying the Lexus for himself, the men make an uneasy alliance: Roy will help Sol with the woman in exchange for the car.

Most of the book is set in Manchester, United Kingdom, in 2025. This is not the 2025 we will all experience in a few years, thus the alternate timeline, unless there are just gobs of secret technological advances sitting in bunkers that nobody is aware of (one of which would need to be time travel so we can back things up a decade or two). But there are plenty of references to places and things in Manchester that someone like me (who has never been to Manchester) would not understand. As a result, reading it was challenging in places. I don’t know where a certain river is or what it looks like now, so it was hard to fully grasp what had changed in terms of landscape. The detail was nice, and the world building was thorough; I just didn’t have a reference point for it.

The point of view changes often, nearly every chapter, without warning and without staying consistent in the timeline. Sol’s point of view is mostly in the present; Y’s point of view is mostly past-tense but there is no marker that gives any indication of how far back her story starts. Roy and the ex-wife alternate between past and present and have such individualized story lines that I’m not entirely sure their characters needed to be as prominent in this novel as they were.

For me, this book had so much potential – post-apocalyptic setting, human modifications, flying police cars, murder, mystery – but maybe that was its downfall. There was a LOT going on in this book. I felt like maybe the author was trying to cram all his favorite things into one book just because he could. I mean, I like chocolate, but I’m not going to top a chocolate brownie with chocolate ice cream and pieces of fudge and cover it all in chocolate syrup and chocolate chips and chocolate-covered pecans to make a sundae. It’s just too much. That’s what this book was like.

FYI – there are very minor spoilers below, so please consider yourself warned. Look away or scroll down or have your dog read it, but skip the next two paragraphs.

There are a lot of characters in this book. Some of them have endings (ahem, death) and some of them, I guess, just go on living. But I would not say any of their story arcs are fully resolved. I’m not sure there’s a sequel coming, so maybe we’re meant to write our own conclusions.

I also didn’t think the book itself had a true ending. Y tells her brothers and sisters to “be defective”, but what does that mean? What is the ultimate goal? Who are they fighting against and how will that impact their world? It would be like telling my kids, “hey, go protest”, and then watching as they decided to protest that I won’t let them eat ice cream for breakfast, and what would the point of that be?Image result for meme confused reading

Either way, this was not my cup of tea and I’m bummed. Graft was on my to-be-read list ever since it came out in 2015 and I finally got around to it. I hate when I’ve been really looking forward to something and it turns out to be bit of a let-down. What a bummer.

Overall: 5/10

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