Title: The Girl in the Road Author: Monica Byrne
Published: May 20, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When Meena, a young woman living in a futuristic India, gets out of bed with mysterious snake bites on her chest, she decides India has become too dangerous. As she plots her exit, she hears of The Trail and knows this is her salvation. The Trail is a bridge that spans the Arabian Sea, connecting India to Africa like a silver ribbon extending to the horizon. Its purpose is to harness the power of the ocean—“blue energy”—but it also offers a sub-culture of travelers a chance for escape and adventure. Meena gathers supplies—a pozit GPS system, a scroll reader, a sealable water-proof pod—and embarks on a journey to Ethiopia, the place of her birth.
Mariama, a girl from a different time, is on a quest of her own. Forced to flee her home, she joins up with a caravan of strangers heading across Saharan Africa. She meets Yemaya, a beautiful and enigmatic woman who becomes her protector and confidante. Yemaya tells Mariama of Ethiopia, where revolution is brewing.
As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama's fates will entwine in ways that are profoundly moving and ultimately shocking.
This was…very strange. I’ve definitely not read something like The Girl in the Road before. Unique as this book was, though, I didn’t necessarily think much of it. I didn’t like this; I didn’t dislike it. I imagine that, overall, my entire experience with this book will turn out to be pretty forgettable.
The Girl in the Road is a split-narrative novel that takes place in the somewhat distant future. Monica Byrne’s narrators young women, Meena and Miriama, who are fairly similar in a lot of ways. Over the course of the book, both are traveling toward Ethiopia (one from the east, one from the west), and eventually the similarities in their two stories converge until the author reaches her conclusion.
I feel like this book should have been interesting. The author dealt a lot with future technology, and though I don’t know much about it, the level of detail present made me think it was legit. The two narrators themselves are also pretty interesting, up to a point. Their voices often seem to be echoes of each other, even though both come from different places in life and are going through different things. Overall, the book is constructed in a way that shows the author thought through things and put them together in a very clever way. There’s a lot of nuance present in The Girl in the Road, which is normally something that I’d appreciate.
Maybe, though, this book was just too abstract for me. I would have liked definite answers about how this future global community works, and maybe the ending was a bit too strange for me. I don’t know. Monica Byrne is very talented, I think, especially considering this is her first book. But nothing about this story really inspired emotion. I read The Girl in the Road quickly, and was relieved when I reached the end (though disappointed that I didn’t necessarily understand it). Basically, this book was not remarkable for me. A lot of the author’s ideas were interesting, but they didn’t come together to make an engaging story. I’m pretty ambivalent towards this book.
