Book-Thirsty Thursday: Tomorrow’s Kin, Nancy Kress

Tomorrow’s Kin just so happens to have plenty of twists and turns for a science fiction novel, and Nancy Kress’ protagonists are deeply human.

Tomorrow’s Kin makes no secret of where it comes from. On the bottom of its dust jacket, it says “Based on the Nebula Award-winning Yesterday’s Kin.” Despite never having read Yesterday‘s Kin (this is the part where you shame me and/or inundate me with comments to read it; my reading list is very long, what can I say?), Tomorrow’s Kin lured me in for what I thought would be a cool if perhaps predictable story.

Boy, was I wrong.

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The dust jacket’s description of the story doesn’t begin to cover what the book is actually about, and it’s probably for the best that you discover it for yourself. Suffice it to say that there are aliens, an oncoming plague of destruction, and scientists trying to work with the former to handle the latter. Even as things get particularly scientific, Nancy Kress provides plenty of context clues and explains enough for things to generally make sense.

She also chooses a particularly common theme — family, as indicated in the title — and reworks it into several different variations, even between all the science goodness. The result is a book that feels human even as it describes various diseases, some real and some a bit more fictional. (And hey, if you can come out of a book saying “I learned way more about diseases I’d never heard of before” but also saying “dang, I’d like to read the next book in this series,” that is more than enough for this reader.)

Kress drops hint after hint about where things are going, making the payoffs seem quite satisfying when they do happen. She covers quite a long period of time throughout the novel, making it feel almost episodic at points, which steers close to making things feel a little bit disjointed, particularly in the middle. And occasionally, some plot points seem somewhat more convenient than they should, which contrasts sharply with the hint-dropping that’s also going on.

However, not everything has really paid off yet. Alas, this book is the start of a trilogy, as I alluded to before. It’s a shame, especially since this book isn’t terribly long, and it means that some things probably won’t pay off until a third book somewhere down the line.

Part of that disjointedness might be the limitation to just a few core characters, but, at the same time, they all share a connection to the main character of the novel, which ties it back into the theme of family. For the most part, Dr. Marianne Jenner is quite engaging, although she might initially seem cold or distant. Kress doesn’t really seem to strive to make her really likable, which again might contribute to that initial feeling. She’s smart, though, and she has some actual flaws that she mostly works through in the course of the novel. Somehow, I get the feeling she won’t necessarily stay the protagonist throughout the other two books.

Next: Review: Heroine Worship, Sarah Kuhn

So, my thirsty readers always looking for a new something to sip on, if you need something that seems frighteningly plausible but still fictional enough to include aliens that go by “Deneb” as a name (although they didn’t really pick it), Tomorrow’s Kin the kind of book you’ll want to add to your own reading list.