Planetfall by Emma Newman

I picked up Planetfall more or less randomly, not knowing what to expect. I had the feeling that it was young adult, but the story within didn't seem YA at all - older characters for one, but also deep dives into mental illness and trauma that I had not been expecting. Best of all, this all felt done well, and urgently, and the story pressing. Honestly, it was one of the most pleasant surprises of the year.

Emma Newman knows how to write, guys. Reading this was an intense experience, as she took us inside the main character Ren, in the grips of PTSD and hoarding, and didn't let go the whole way through. Those mental issues aren't all of who Ren is, but she's been struggling so long that one more stressor is about all it would take to break her. She's strong, but fraying, and the way the readaer is taken along on that journey with her is powerful and internal. And stressful.

So, the story. A small settlement of people live on a planet in the shadow of a huge building/growth/shrine/monolith called God's City. They followed a woman from Earth to this place, when she believed she was on a divine mission, led to these coordinates. She is said to live within the monolith, and sends out yearly  messages to the people still living in the village below.

Right near the beginning, though, we learn two things from Ren, short for Renata. Suh, the prophet and her friend and perhaps lover, isn't alive in there or isn't quite alive - we know something happened to her, but not what. She's definitely not sending those yearly messages. Another occupant of the village is, and he and Renata are also in some way implicated in an accident that killed a bunch of the seekers.

We get this through Ren's eyes, so burdened with guilt and stress over these long-ago events, she can barely look at them head-on. Life goes on in a holding pattern in this village, supported by matter printers, which Ren maintains - and raids the discards for bits she can salvage and fix, driven to try to make things better. Even if she never gets around to it. It's an impulse without a good outlet, because she can't even think about the things that need the most fixing.

Then a strange human comes, on a planet that should have no other humans. He's a survivor of the pod lost or purposefully destroyed, alone. The society tries to find a place for him, while writing meaning over his arrival. He is the first to realize that Ren's introversion is hiding deeper problems and strives to bring them to light.

Meanwhile, Ren ventures into God's City on illicit investigations, and finally, after many years, starts to gain some insight into what the city might be and what brought them there.

I don't want to give more away, because a great deal of the pleasure of this book was in the journey. It's interesting - you know you're in the mind of an unstable narrator, and it's stressful to be there. Even as people reached out to help her, the prose was such that I felt her anxiety and understood it from the inside, rather that just seeing it from a distance. That's a huge thing to be able to do, to take a reader into the mind of someone who is acting in ways that seem irrational, and make them understandable. To make me want to protect her.

There are points at which each of us would break, and I've always thought that that adage about God never giving anyone more than they could handle was bullshit, and I think I would think so even if I were Christian. It's perfectly possible to have more happen than can be borne, for anyone, and sometimes it does. What do you do in the aftermath? And when you live in the shadow of the unknown?