City of Orange
David Yoon
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons
2022, 332 pp.
A man awakens, injured, outdoors in an unfamiliar place. His memory is a jigsaw where his recall image shapes snuggle up to his present reality. With caution, he scouts his surroundings for survival. He meets two people that help fit him into his future.
The details of his new living space, a river culvert in California, is symbolic of the brain space that's reluctant to release the information of the how and why he ended up below a bridge with a massive headache, no identification, a strange key in his shoe, amnesia, and wondering how the apocalypse happened.
The narrative shakes out details like a special seasoning rub. At times, it smothers the heart of the story.
Enter another memory, compressions of survival moving the narrative away from possible book boredom. The actions he takes are reasonable, no drama for sensasionalism's sake.
An easy 5 hour read, this is a thinker novel read in one sitting. I was yawning at 2 AM from lack of sleep, not boredom, feeling how very refreshing to read a book that tells a story without obvious hint markers, and, over use of references to well known products and such.
The title reference to orange is well into the novel, interesting, but not a match for the striking potential the book has. For that I give it a 4.5 stars out of 5, a novel for my read again some day list.
