I virtually never dip into the fantasy book genre these days, but Lauren Beukes' Zoo City came so highly recommended, and from so many different friends, that I had to give it a try. (And the fact that I snagged a Kindle copy on sale for .99 definitely helped!)

 

As a rule, I have a very low tolerance for the "urban fantasy" sub-genre. Too many hours spent playing Shadowrun in my youth. You understand. But the urban fantasy of Zoo City is so unusual, fresh, and at the same time so socially relevant that I was enthralled.

 

The setting is contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa. The protagonist is a member of a new underclass: criminals whose sins are made manifest by the animal familiars which become attached to them by the largely-unexplained Undertow. These people, known as "Zoos," find themselves on the wrong side of a modern-day version of Apartheid. 

 

They also each develop their own magical skill, and this is what kicks the plot into motion. There's a murder mystery, and a missing girl, and the insatiable appetite of the music industry, and FOR ONCE the answer to the mystery isn't "a serial killer did it."

 

This was a great read, with a strong female protagonist, which I always appreciate. I was a little leery of the idea of a white author discussing apartheid from the perspective of a black (I think?) narrator in South Africa. But Beukes is deft with her work, and imbues each character, no matter how tangential, with humanity. 

 

My only issue with the book was that (as often happens) I had a sort of ongoing low-level confusion about the parameters. Why did this start happening? Was there any relationship between the person's crime and the animal they received? Did everyone receive a different animal, or were there other Sloths out there? And most of all, on the difference between the magical familiar animals and regular animals. 

 

The familiars seem at times to understand the speech of their owners. But at other times, they behave as an ordinary animal would. At the end, an albino Crocodile (the magical animals are always capitalized) seems to help out Zinzi by nodding in the direction of the exit. But does it really? The scene is highly charged, emotional, and magic is being released everywhere. It could be just one of those things, you know?

 

A lot of people have the same problem with Stewie Griffin, the megalomaniacal baby on "Family Guy." Can everyone understand him? Or only certain characters? The only honest answer is, "it depends." And maybe that is the case with Zoo City as well.