Book Review: Prophet

The cover of the book shows a large silver spherical shape on a silver background. Below the sphere is a dark shadow with the silhouette of two small people standing under it. Across the top in large black letters is "prophet" and "a novel" in small letters below that. Across the bottom in white letters is Sin Blache and Helen MacDonald. Below that in smaller white letters is "author of h is for hawk."

Prophet is a novel that I rate highly for one main reason: It was fun. There are criticisms to be had about plot holes and tropes, but honestly, I chose it on a whim and it was exactly the kind of scifi/horror(?) detour from my current stress-filled existence that I needed. It is like the less horrifying lovechild of Vandermeer's Southern Reach/Area X trilogy, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, and Christopher Nolan's Inception gay fan fiction. I cannot take credit for the latter comparison, but when I read their review, I saw it immediately as the descriptive piece I was missing in my assessments of the book as it progressed. I am not usually a fanfiction person, but my partner and I at the time got playfully into consuming Arthur (them) and Eames (me) fan art and memes (I blush saying this, wishing I was still as confident and shameless as I was in 2010.) I see how people could get really into all of it in general. Apparently the authors desired this, which was an unexpected thing to find when googling them.

The blurb gives you plenty to go on, but I would say this is a book more about relationships than it is about scifi. Or perhaps it is that the relationships are the most fleshed out. However, I would still classify it as more of a scifi book than a romance. I remember the interactions between the people in it more than I recall the weird elements and special abilities in it, but the world it is set in was more immersive than I realized and feels pretty critical for the romance to work as well as it did. I do not know how much each of the authors had to do with writing the story, but I have not read H is for Hawk, so I went in without expectations anyway.

The ending was definitely fantastic. For reasons I will not explain to avoid spoilers, there was part of it that initially made me mad due to a history with tropes but then another part made up for it. I am now curious about what else these authors could create together and apart in a similar genre. Perhaps the style of collaboration is part of what caused some of the flaws. I cannot imagine writing a fiction book on my own let alone with another person I only knew online.

This was also posted to my goodreads.