SOUL SEARCHING REVIEW
The first review is in! And it's a goodie:
From Joanna Woods Africa in Words:
Drawing on our inner and imagining our afterlives, revealing a "larger narrative about systems of belief on our planet”.
Selected excerpts:
Embleton’s narrative pushes against the Western ideological status-quo in science fiction. The novel is marked by astronomical traditions; sangomas are written into its pages; and, the interesting persona Ma’at, a goddess ostensibly based on the Egyptian goddess of truth and harmony, figures centrally.
Overall, the close attention paid to characters and their relationships with one another underscores how belief systems form, influence, and are entangled in lives, and this starts from the moment of childhood.
Soul Searching is a work that packs in and tries to do a lot, but throughout its 368 pages the author maintains suspense and with moments of poetic prose interwoven, the sense of intrigue and craft is also conserved.
Mixing strategies of analepsis often ascribed to tales of the magically real and proleptic strategies of harder science fiction, as well as interweaving crime, Embleton’s style is similar to other prominent South African speculative fiction novelists, novelists such as Masande Ntshanga and Lauren Beukes.
