review; plus one
Plus One
by Elizabeth Fama
It takes guts to deliberately mutilate your hand while operating a blister-pack sealing machine, but all I had going for me was guts.
Sol Le Coeur is a Smudge – a night dweller in an America rigidly divided between people who wake, live, and work during the hours of darkness and those known as Rays who live and work during daylight. Impulsive, passionate, and brave, Sol deliberately injures herself in order to gain admission to a hospital, where she plans to kidnap her newborn niece – a Ray – in order to bring the baby to visit her dying grandfather. By violating the day-night curfew, Sol is committing a serious crime, and when the kidnap attempt goes awry it starts a chain of events that will put Sol in mortal danger, uncover a government conspiracy to manipulate the Smudge population, and throw her together with D’Arcy Benoît, the Ray medical apprentice who first treats her, then helps her outrun the authorities – and with whom she is fated to fall impossibly and irrevocably in love.
Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights—and a compelling, rapid-fire romantic adventure story.
Review:The concept of this story is fascinating – a world in which the people are divided by the times they are awake. Half the population are Rays, awake during the hours the sun is up, going to school and working, and sleeping at night. The other half are Smudges, awake and working and schooling at night, and made to sleep during the day.
Sol is a Smudge whose only priority in life is her grandfather, Poppu. He is her whole world, especially after her brother switched his assignment from Smudge to Ray and basically cut himself off from his family. The lengths Sol is willing to go to for Poppu’s happiness is the pretty much the driving force of the novel. If it were not done well, the story would fall flat.
Thankfully, it is palpable just how much she loves her grandfather, and it is believable that she is willing to throw her entire life away to bring her grandfather a moment of happiness. Complications, however, form in the appearance of Medical Assistant D’Arcy, who Sol thinks is just another Ray, but who turns out to be something else entirely.
The burgeoning love story between the two is done very well, and Sol’s emotions are captured wonderfully. But better than just that is the underlying political and social unrest that colours the world, and colours the way they see each other and the world around them. That unrest makes the story a compelling one, and it is a wonderful way to show the inequalities in the world – and in America – by heightening the things that already exist in such an abstract way.
The fact that the story ends without complete resolution about the unrest makes things all the more real and palpable. The mentions of a darker world, the power plays that exist away from the foreground of Sol’s life, keeps the story from being a simple one, and I, for one, am very glad to have read the book. I definitely think I would read more of the author’s work.
Ara
I’m Ara, a Southeast Asian writer who someday hopes to have published a novel, and who is currently losing herself in the worlds created by others. I love books and food and television and blogging and I get distracted and sidetracked easily.