Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 6 reviews on
"A spellbinding book." --Megha Majumdar
"Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent." --Cathy Park Hong In the near future, a young woman finds her mother's body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets out on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students beset by a drought and living at the edge of a war as they create a new way of existing to help the people around them. As she works on the translation, her life and the manuscript become entangled. Later, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project force her to question her own moral compass. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world? Written in vivid and pulsating prose that alternates between the young woman's life and passages of the translated manuscript, Akil Kumarasamy's Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age when we are caught within the swamps of our own minds."Kumarasamy's quirky language and wit are dazzling . . . [Her] humor is the way I dig it--deep--extending an opportunity for the reader to take a beat before absorbing the novel's more sobering themes." --Melissa Chadburn, The New York Times Book Review
"[Meet Us by the Roaring Sea] feels beautifully balanced--chapters threaded together nimbly, the translated manuscript and the protagonist's life echoing each other . . . Kumarasamy is also such an assured writer that you trust her completely, sentence by sentence . . . A pleasure to read." --Ilana Masad, LA Times "If you want a post-climate-change novel that goes all the way weird, look no further than Meet Us by the Roaring Sea . . . The story is a kind of multilayered dream sequence that asks big questions about civilization, memory and survival . . . Kumarasamy's gorgeously written book captures the terror of living through a bewildering disruption." --Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post