Your Summer Read: Sublimation
I am in the middle of listening to Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim. Normally, I'd wait until the end to pass along a recommendation, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you to pick it up now. It's that good.
The book is a work of speculative fiction. Picture the world exactly as we know it, with one change. Sometimes, when people leave their home country and travel to another, they "instance"--sending one version of themselves to the new country and leaving another version of their selves in the old.
Obviously, it's about immigration. But in such a new way. It's moving and awful--the emotions and characters are so real that I find myself worried and angry and hopeful and sad along with them. It is absolutely gripping. I am equal parts excited for and dreading the back half of the book.
Here's the publisher's pitch:
The border cuts you in two.
When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.
Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.
She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.
How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?
