The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I honestly want to like this book more than I did. I think it was the core concept of moving buildings, always at 4 am, hopping from one location to another in the NYC (and other places), just causing a shoehorned chaos every day.

Sure, it doesn't make any sense, but that's the SURREAL for you.

So, I kinda went in thinking about having such a thing just LEAN into the surreal, think about The City and the City, or Invisible Cities, or even a bit of Borges. It could have been deep and weird and impressionistic and sometimes even a little wild--but instead we got something that went hard on the Literary SF angle, about personal lives rather going down the toilet, or just being uprooted and always just teetering on the edge of dissolution.

I frankly didn't really like any of the characters. They were either too cringey or dissolute EVEN IF I actually like long stream of consciousness writing in general. Especially when it goes deep into the woods. But, unfortunately, the novel kept trying to go in different directions.

It even attempted to nudge us toward a SF reason, and then to a mystical reason, before going the Literary Fiction direction--and all the while, all these pieces just felt SHOEHORNED in. I mean... sure, such an event would definitely call for a serious renewable energy push, would absolutely necessitate grass-roots real-people aid, but to reverse cause and effect, saying ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE would have caused the unmapping of buildings, popping up all over the place like a dream, just felt like an enormous stretch. And no, it wasn't ever confirmed in the novel, thank god, but it coming up multiple times was multiple times too many. I would have bought it if we were to just read the novel as an ALLEGORY... but the allegory stuff, if it was there, was all lost in a morass of anxiety meds and loss of selfhood.

So, great potential idea, but everything else just felt too... shoehorned, try-hard. Alas.

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