“You have to really look at a place, for among time, to see it clear…I know the opposite is also true, I’m guessing it’s that way with you, you loved this place so hard you turned blind.” 

The Unmapping isn’t a book about Emergency Management and broken systems that are trying their best regardless. It isn’t a book about grief, trauma, or the ever changing nature of reality. It isn’t even really about community and the inevitable flaws of humanity in close contact. It’s all of those, and something so much more.

I love surrealism because it forces your brain into taking this obsene, absurd premise of a city shuffling its buildings around, as straight fact. You step over the initial hump of shock and awe and into the world with parallels to reality you can’t even fully grasp. At least that’s what happens for me. The reality is that this version of the end of the world probably isn’t going to happen but we as readers and as humans living in modern post-capitalism have already experienced the end of the world over and over and over again. 

What’s next is the interesting part. When we figure out how to get into the nitty gritty dirt band work of hurting each other and asking forgiveness. Causing new problems by fixing old ones. Holding hands across the street to stand up against chaos and indifference. We live in a society and part of the reason our messy culture loves to write stories set in NYC is because its parallels to that society are so clear. Cities are the place where chaos and order smash into each other, gridded roads coming right up to the edge of a river that isn’t a river. Boroughs and neighborhoods that are so culturally defined they forgot where the geographic boundaries are supposed to be. So many people standing on the same street corner each wrapped in their own bubble of anonymity. These dicotomies aren’t opposites, they are continuations. Contradictions are the only way we’re going to save the world, by letting it end again and again. 

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for this review. All opinions are my own