UNITY

A lowly servant to the mob hires a haunted mercenary to escort her and her lover across a bleak, post-apocalyptic America in Bangs’ debut.

Danae is a woman of many secrets, chiefly that she isn’t a woman at all: She is many people in one body. It takes a while to get to the specifics of what exactly that means, mainly because Danae begins the novel escaping a rapidly collapsing futuristic underwater city with her partner, Naoto, and a hired gun named Alexei. Danae hires Alexei to escort her and Naoto back to dry land and across the climate change–ravaged former United States. Between the action-packed escape to the surface and the bloodthirsty warlord named Duke who’s tailing Danae for reasons she won’t explain, the reader gets only hints and partial explanations of who Danae is for most of the first half. That’s all well and good for worldbuilding and establishing tension, but Bangs does it almost too well. When we get into the specifics of how Danae came to be, the explanation is so rich with philosophical themes and narrative possibilities that it’s a little disappointing it didn't appear until the second half of the novel. The secondary villain, called only Borrower, is so deeply fascinating it seems a shame we needed to bother with warlords and mobsters at all.

The action and adventure at the beginning are fine, but stick around for the good stuff at the end.