The Strange

304 pages

English language

Published Dec. 20, 2023 by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers.

ISBN:: 978-1-5344-4995-4

(1 review)

1931, New Galveston , Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance.

Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit , Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s …

1931, New Galveston , Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance.

Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit , Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.

Nathan Ballingrud’s stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and the Hulu series Monsterland , The Strange is his first novel.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

3 stars

The author's notes of this book pitch it as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit, which I think is quite accurate. If I had to sum up the premise, it's "shitty teen blackmails local fuckup to help her recover a stolen recording of her mother through a journey across a desert filled with weird horror".

The Mars of this book feels very much like an extension of the American west. Here, the first Mars landing was in 1864, there's some wars with Germans over territory (a WW1 analog?), and folks are mining and settling Mars when this book takes place in 1931. This book doesn't concern itself with things like breathable atmosphere or domes, and instead is much more vibes-based about Martian dirt. When a spacesuit does show up it's a classic horror element rather than anything about breathable air. (In some ways this retro future conceit reminds …

The author's notes of this book pitch it as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit, which I think is quite accurate. If I had to sum up the premise, it's "shitty teen blackmails local fuckup to help her recover a stolen recording of her mother through a journey across a desert filled with weird horror".

The Mars of this book feels very much like an extension of the American west. Here, the first Mars landing was in 1864, there's some wars with Germans over territory (a WW1 analog?), and folks are mining and settling Mars when this book takes place in 1931. This book doesn't concern itself with things like breathable atmosphere or domes, and instead is much more vibes-based about Martian dirt. When a spacesuit does show up it's a classic horror element rather than anything about breathable air. (In some ways this retro future conceit reminds me of Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes where despite being a space city on Jupiter, it feels like a direct extension of Sherlock's foggy London.)

I enjoyed this even as I found the protagonist Annabelle a bit insufferable, and the vibes-based space science a little hard to wrap my brain around. I particularly enjoyed the horror elements (ghost gardens! angry war machines! possessed space suit!) and the retro robots whose programming is on physical cylinders that are inserted and removed from them. I also love a good abandoned colony story too.

(Also, here's a few other content warned thoughts.)