The Girl Who Found the Sun by Matthew S. Cox Book Tour
In The Girl Who Found the Sun, Matthew S. Cox presents us with the post-apocalyptic tale of a young woman and mother in her early ‘20s named Raven Wilder. Raven has lived her whole life in a self-contained underground shelter called the Arc. The shelter was established as a refuge for 2,000 people from a catastrophic, but only vaguely remembered, environmental crisis hundreds of years before. Now, centuries later, the Arc has fallen into near total decay. Less than 200 descendants live in its shambles, slowly losing the fight to keep it going. Raven is the youngest and most talented engineer holding the Arc and their dying community together.
Raven views the Arc through the lens of an engineer and a mother. It is falling apart and has become dangerous. Her six year old daughter shows signs of being slowly poisoned by diminishing air quality. Raven no longer sees the Arc as a refuge, which it surely was centuries ago. She sees it as an enemy, a monster desiring to become the sepulcher of her people. When an opportunity arises to go to the surface and make repairs, she jumps at the chance. She has significant misgivings regarding her community’s beliefs about the surface, a patchwork mythology which includes monstrous aliens called Plutions and face-melting toxicity. This relatively simple repair trip ends up changing everything.
Initially, I found this book somewhat challenging. Full disclosure: I am not a mechanically inclined person. If you put a nut and bolt in front of me, I will be lucky to figure out which parts go where. The first chapters, where we follow Raven on a routine repair job in an Arc engineering duct, were slow for a person like me. I got a little lost in the long, technical descriptions of the Arc and Raven’s work. It started to feel a bit like slipping into a technical manual for mechanical engineering. That said, I am sure this won’t be a problem for all readers and I am happy I stuck with it.
The greatest strength of the book is the protagonist, Raven. She is intelligent, clever, resourceful, compassionate, willing to challenge authority for what is right, and adventurous. It took very little time for me to make her struggles, worries, victories, and defeats my own. After the first few chapters, we slowly see a collection of mysteries and incongruities set up which require resolution. As they become more pronounced, Raven is drawn into the conflict of different personalities within the Arc community, the needs of her daughter, and a desire to break free of a world that seems to constrain her unnecessarily.
In the course of her story, Raven becomes a foil for the conflict of youth and age, the feminine and masculine. The Arc is run by leaders entrenched in the past, desperate to preserve what has been done by their predecessors. The weight of this past is now killing them. The challenge of youth, with its fresh experience and righteous recklessness, is the needed salve for their illness. Furthermore, it is surely no accident that every Arc leader we encounter is male and seemingly childless. Thus, in Raven, we also see a challenge to authority brought with the strength and wisdom rooted in the feminine and maternal. It is this challenge alone, if they accept it, that will save their people.
At the heart of the novel’s setting and plot is also a powerful environmental message. The novel slowly reveals an Earth which was nearly entirely destroyed by the willful ignorance and unrestrained craving of past humans (who were clearly us). One of the most clever plot devices is the way Cox repeats this lesson twice, in parallel revelations, during the course of the book. We learn that the ancient humans allowed the Earth and themselves to die due to their willful ignorance. They refused to see what was right in front of their faces. The Arc community of Raven’s time is similarly dying, living in denial of their bleak situation, and fearful of the mythic terrors awaiting them on a surface they have not encountered in centuries.
Readers who enjoy post-apocalyptic literature, science fiction, and/or tales of young women growing into their full maturity and leadership are sure to enjoy Matthew S. Cox’s “The Girl Who Found the Sun”. To be fair, it is probably not of the first and highest order of post-apocalyptic storytelling. I don’t personally see this book being enthroned among the great pantheon that includes books like The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, I Am Legend, The Stand, and A Canticle for Leibowitz. However, it is a compelling, well written, and satisfying read. There is no question it is enjoyable storytelling and will please almost any genre fan.
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This book was sent to us for free in exchange for an honest review from Black Thorn
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