Tugboat crews routinely encounter what few of us will ever see. They easily read a vessel’s size, shape, function, and features, while deciphering at a glance the mysterious numbers, letters, and symbols on a ship’s hull. To non-mariners, the markings look like hieroglyphs. For those in the know, they speak volumes about a particular ship and also about the shipping industry.
As our understanding of the universe expanded, so too did the range of what could be considered habitable.
The premise is elegant. The In-Between traces a love story through its pivotal moments: not the milestone decisions or cataclysmic quarrels, but the encounters that deepen intimacy. The moments of grace. As Tsiolkas skips from one scene to the next – jumping weeks and months ahead – readers are left to fill the narrative gaps, to imagine the “in-between” for themselves.
Though the novella’s title gestures towards the baptismal, cleansing nature of the story it tells, the metaphor remains implicit, and is never really drawn out in the course of the book. What Boyne offers instead of innovation is an almost note-perfect piece of first-person storytelling.
The simplest way I can frame my own reaction to City Authentic is that it isn’t a book that necessarily reveals brand new phenomenons or problems, nor does it show every step of how FIRE entities take over cities. This is a book that offers readers new, necessary language to apply toward the incredibly complex urban phenomenons and problems they’re quite familiar with, and it’s worth spending time unpacking just how deeply this text has lodged in my brain like a pop song.