Review: Turn Left at the Mooncrow skeleton by Linda Raedisch

 The Book:

"Welcome to Planet 5372, a uniquely dystopian world where the unlikely heroes include a handful of shambolic university students and their taciturn landlord. Raedisch's layered writing and photographic attention to detail make this slice-of-life archaeological adventure entirely believable." ---Clarissa Simmens, author of Parallel Universe Cafe and Other Poems

For the past two hundred years, the colonists marooned on Planet 5372 have been confined to a volcanic basin the size of New Jersey. Outside the Basin lie the uninhabitable (some say haunted) ruins known as the Outer Cities. Bored with campus life at the colony’s only university, twenty-year-old Numi rents a room from Kelda, an uneducated, thirty-something carpenter whose movements are closely monitored by the “shingles” or neighborhood deputies. Numi doesn’t mind running interference between the reserved Kelda and his rambunctious tenants, but the two can never be more than friends. Numi’s an up-and-coming academic, and Kelda’s a Tyrrhenian, a descendant of the manual laborers who cleared the toxic vegetation from the Basin.

As Halloween approaches, Numi is still summoning the courage to confront Kelda with her suspicion that he’s mixed up in the black market trade in “magical paraphernalia,” mysterious carved objects left behind by the planet’s indigenous, supposedly extinct inhabitants. Time runs out on Mischief Night when Kelda disappears, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

Numi faces a decision. She can report her suspicions to the shingles, or she can follow her landlord to the one place she thought she could never go: the Outer Cities.

My Thoughts:

This book is a fellow contender in SPSFC4 (The Self Published Science Fiction Competition) and it caught my eye because it involves a population of people called Tyrrhenians, which is also the case with my entry into this contest, The Arid Lands.

Needless to say our Tyrrhenians are all very different.

But on to the book.

This is a delightful read, well written with vivid worldbuilding. It’s a slow burn of a book and I very much enjoyed immersing myself into the world the author has created. At its heart is an archaeological mystery through which the history of this planet is gradually revealed, but I also loved the characters that inhabit this world. I found Numi particularly relatable and the undercurrent of simmering attraction between her and Kelda was skillfully done.

All in all a very enjoyable read.

I hope this books goes far in SPSFC4. It deserves to.