Release Date: June 7th 2016
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Rating: 2 out 5
Summary: When we first meet Kit, she's a fox.
Nineteen-year-old Kit works for the research department of Shen Corporation as a phenomenaut. She's been “jumping”--projecting her consciousness, through a neurological interface--into the bodies of lab-grown animals made for the purpose of research for seven years, which is longer than anyone else at ShenCorp, and longer than any of the scientists thought possible. She experiences a multitude of other lives--fighting and fleeing as predator and prey, as mammal, bird, and reptile--in the hope that her work will help humans better understand the other species living alongside them.
Her closest friend is Buckley, her Neuro--the computer engineer who guides a phenomenaut through consciousness projection. His is the voice, therefore, that's always in Kit's head and is the thread of continuity that connects her to the human world when she's an animal. But when ShenCorp's mission takes a more commercial--and ominous--turn, Kit is no longer sure of her safety. Propelling the reader into the bodies of the other creatures that share our world, The Many Selves of Katherine North takes place in the near future but shows us a dazzling world far, far from the realm of our experience.
Review:
This is one of the strangest books that I have ever read. I will not lie. This novel was hard to get into, especially right at the beginning. It’s both a fascinating world and the concept that Geen has created, but there are so many themes she’s created that go unexplained, and it’s left to the reader to gather what they mean from the context in which they’re used. And, while the chapters are short, they’re told in an alternating timeline between past and present, although it is rarely that immediately clear which timeline you are in (even with the vague descriptions of Uncanny Shift and Come Home at the beginnings of the chapters).
Throughout the novel, it’s clear that in the present, Kit is on the run from ShenCorp, but it’s not revealed why until the end of the novel. One problem that I had was that I felt like the reveal and the ‘flash back’ timeline to the events that take place, in the beginning, took a bit too long to happen. The tension and anticipation kept being drawn out to where, when it finally happened, it felt a brief rush and anticlimactic, and not as satisfying as it should have been because I’d had to wait so long.
That being said, I loved the whole idea of the novel, and it raised some interesting moral questions towards the end. Geen has a background in philosophy, and it shows at various points. It’s a powerful novel, once you wrap your head around what’s happening, and it’s guaranteed to get you thinking, even long after you’ve closed the covers and walked away.
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