Zinzi December is a animalled – aposymbiotic. She has done something bad in the past – she has killed someone – and since the mid 90s that has caused people to manifest their own animals. The animalled all gain a special power upon having their animal, but it doesn't compare to the widespread prejudice and hatred society shows them – nor to the constant threat of the Undertow. A darkness that chases and hunts down animalled when their companions are killed and stalks them until then.
Zinzi has the power to find things people have lost, following the connections of them to their objects. She has had a hard life, an ex-journalist who fell into drug use, the spiral of which eventually ended up with her brother dead and her carrying around Sloth, she now ekes out a living in the slum Zoo City, a derelict, crime ridden and poverty stricken area of Johannesburg with a large animalled population. Trying to get by in the face of prejudice, her severe drug debt she is pulled into a swamp of the music industry trying to find a missing pop starlette who is tipped to be the next big thing – but has gone missing.
Then suddenly there are deaths, homeless people being murdered and going missing and a shadowy underworld to the music industry and her employers she never imagined.
Ye gods of mercy, this book was hard read. It's a crying shame since we were excited to find a book with a black protagonist and then it turns out to be such a damn battle to get through (Renee quit early, light weight!) It's LA Banks all over again, alas.
This book spends a lot of time providing insight into the world by having every chapter start with excerpts from documentaries, from scholarly articles, from magazine articles – even a 419 scam email. It illustrates the world well and it's actually an interesting way to both add world building and to add a lot more flavour and theme to the world. The problem is that they were very very long and completely broke up the flow of the plot which already had problems. We didn't need a long magazine article about a fictitious music industry. We didn't need an article explaining the troubled past of a music entrepreneur, we've already seen he has one, we don't need the details. We didn't need documentary excerpts explaining things about the animalled when we'd already been shown these things – you've shown us, you don't need to tell us. We didn't need an entire 419 scam email (and it's longer than any I've received!) and when we get random emails through the story we don't need all the details – To: from, cc etc etc quoted. Honestly, my gmail knows better than to show me all this excess info, so why is this author? We didn't need all this. It was long, it was excessive and it was distracting.
