Since my focus for this month is on autism, I want to specifically address Aster’s autism in the novel. And through all of that – through oppression so strong that the hopelessness of it seeps into everything – the plot races ahead, through mystery and romance and rebellion, drawing the reader along. The people around her, (in general, except for the most powerful on the spaceship), share in at least one of those, and the group dynamics of oppression as well as the individual dynamics are illustrated poignantly and play an important role in the story.

Aster, the main character, is autistic, female (though not gender-conforming, and other characters bend gender lines even more), dark-skinned, and lower class. After the first few chapters, however, circumstances and conversations began to carry the weight of the book, displaying the multiple disparate avenues oppression and bigotry can travel, and giving a painful, complex view into what intersectionality of marginalization can look like. While the setting is pure science fiction (the novel takes place on an enormous spaceship hundreds of years into exile from a dying Earth), the targeted cruelty and indifferent hatred are innately human in the worst sense of that word.Īt the beginning of the book, I wondered if perhaps the story was attempting to touch upon too many themes – if the plot and the characters would fall flat under the weight of a treatise or an essay. Yet I find myself unable to claim that Solomon’s portrayal is unrealistic or unbelievable, because I have seen these very things in many times and cultures and places in the pages of history (not excluding our present time).

I have rarely, in fiction, encountered such a blunt portrayal of normalized oppression, institutionalized poverty, and systemic racism. An Unkindness of Ghosts is not an easy book to read, because the themes it tackles are some of the hardest for humanity to acknowledge and contemplate.

An unkindness of ghosts characters