The Book of Koli

Title: The Book of Koli

Author: M R Carey

Summary: Everything that lives hates us…

Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognisable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don’t get you, the Shunned men will.

Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don’t venture too far beyond the walls.

He’s wrong.

Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5

Review: I’ve read and loved several books by Carey previously, so of course I wanted to read another science fiction dystopian series from him. Now. I started reading this book in February 2021. I finished in it December 2022. This is in no way the book’s fault! I was suffering with severe anxiety when I first started the book and was struggling to read anything. I got about halfway through when I decided to put it aside. Having more recently regained my love and motivation for reading I picked this one back up and carried on where I left off.

The first half of the book sets up what life is like in Mythen Rood, the village our main character, Koli, lives in. He has a simply life as a woodcutter with his family and his friends. And okay, so there’s a massive wall around the village, and dangerous drones that show up occasionally, and folk seem to be very wary of the trees for some reason. There is a distinct lack of technology, except among the elite few who can make the weapons they have come alive. Koli, being an ambitious young fellow, gets his hands on some tech and gets himself into trouble.

The second half of the book follows Koli outside the walls of Mythen Rood, experiencing what else there is in this dystopian world. He finds killer trees, empty villages, old and new friends enemies. And, of course, getting himself into more trouble. I won’t say too much else on that.

My very favourite thing about this book is characters describing technology and other old-word items that they’ve never come across before, but are well-known things to the reader. It’s like a guessing game. A large piece of tech hammered together out of sheets of metal with wheels inside a great big metal band and a pipe sticking out. A soft slippery cloth puffed up like a pillow. Any guesses? There are loads of them, and I love it!

Language is another great thing. Seeing how it has evolved over time or how old and unknown words are pronounced and interpreted to make sense with the words people already know and understand. Mythen Rood, for example, had a previous and similar sounding name we’d be more familiar with. Koli doesn’t know how you communicate with tech and so when he learns the word he calls it an in-their-face. This shit is freaking catnip to me, I can’t get enough of it.

There were quite a few characters, all well-rounded and flawed and real. Which makes it hard to hate any of them, though I only truly loved a few. Koli, Monono, Ursula… controversial, possibly, but I loved Sky simply for how competent and no-nonsense she is. And Cup. I knew there was something about her, from the way Koli described her. There was something more to learn about her story and who she was—she was certainly going to be important to Koli. It was towards the end of the book, when we learn a little something about her, that I legitimately squealed with joy and the rating I was giving the book jumped from a 4.5 to a 5.

I don’t think I have ever been so keen to get on and read the next book in a series. There are so many hints and clues and foreshadowing and points to connect. I have theories, and I need to know how everything comes together, when and what details are revealed, and what the hell happened in the past and will happen in the future. Most of my theories involve Ursula. She knows so much. How? Who was she before she became a wandering doctor-of-sorts? How old is she? I have some ideas. I also kind of maybe half suspect (or, at least, I want to believe) that this story is set in the far flung future of The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s a stretch, but noxious trees and enough time… let me have this.

Suffice to say I will be reading the next book in the series soon!