Escaping Exodus

336 pages

English language

Published Feb. 26, 2019 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-286773-5

(1 review)

Escaping Exodus is a story of a young woman named Seske Kaleigh, heir to the command of a biological, city-size starship carved up from the insides of a spacefaring beast. Her clan has just now culled their latest ship and the workers are busy stripping down the bonework for building materials, rerouting the circulatory system for mass transit, and preparing the cavernous creature for the onslaught of the general populous still in stasis. It’s all a part of the cycle her clan had instituted centuries ago—excavate the new beast, expand into its barely-living carcass, extinguish its resources over the course of a decade, then escape in a highly coordinated exodus back into stasis until they cull the next beast from the diminishing herd.

And of course there wouldn’t be much of a story if things didn’t go terribly, terribly wrong.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden

4 stars

Escaping Exodus is an afrofuture science fiction novel about future space colonists living inside of giant space whales. It's a hard book to pin down--it's messy, literally and metaphorically.

I want to say this book is a YA book, as it feels like bingo full coverage of ghosthoney's dystopian YA tiktok video. Forbidden love across exaggerated and artificial class boundaries. Wild biological worldbuilding elements. Matriarchy and gender flips. Novel family structures. Horrible Omelas-esque abuses. One of the protagonists starts a revolution. But, it's also much darker and full of way more body horror than I usually expect from YA as well.

I would love to know if there is a word for this, but this book engages in the technique where it uses a common noun like "heart murmur" but then it turns out to have an unexpected meaning in this world. In this case, Adalla is a beastworker …

Escaping Exodus is an afrofuture science fiction novel about future space colonists living inside of giant space whales. It's a hard book to pin down--it's messy, literally and metaphorically.

I want to say this book is a YA book, as it feels like bingo full coverage of ghosthoney's dystopian YA tiktok video. Forbidden love across exaggerated and artificial class boundaries. Wild biological worldbuilding elements. Matriarchy and gender flips. Novel family structures. Horrible Omelas-esque abuses. One of the protagonists starts a revolution. But, it's also much darker and full of way more body horror than I usually expect from YA as well.

I would love to know if there is a word for this, but this book engages in the technique where it uses a common noun like "heart murmur" but then it turns out to have an unexpected meaning in this world. In this case, Adalla is a beastworker who at one point is responsible for cleaning out parts of the space whale beast's heart, like taking care of heart murmurs. But then it turns out that heart murmurs are not just things to be removed, but are also living creatures and are sometimes kept as pets?!

For me the best parts of the book are all in the worldbuilding. Everything is biological; permanent housing is made out of bones, the handwashing stations are hoglets, people get high on random gasses from the beast, and mucus is used for space travel. I love this idea of tiny humans trying to eke out a living instead of a giant space beast, and parasitically trying to take care of it as well.

Past that, I think there's a lot that's rough about the book; the plot pulls the characters along and there's not as much depth to them as I want. A number of plot points or world details don't make a ton of sense if you think too much about them. The relationship definitely makes no sense to me. The whole thing just feels not polished in a way that makes it hard to recommend.

Mostly hoping that I can kiss you without something weird happening, I'm hoping I can. I'm worried that I can't.

This quote is out of context, but I'm just leaving this here for anybody else who has read this, but holy moly the weirdness of this scene and everything that happens afterwards. I was... unprepared.