Name: Hummingbird Salamander
ISBN: 9780374173548

Jeff VanderMeer

From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things. Security consultant “Jane Smith” receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control. Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina’s footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out—for her and possibly for the world. Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.

A Novel

Hummingbird Salamander

Emiley Jones

I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

To many, they were not bad people, not even close. Pillars of the community. They believed in the future. They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away.

Consumed by the fire, you might rise as a phoenix. Or you might just be a pile of crumbling ashes.

I was stuck about a third of a way through this read, because me and the protagonist weren't getting along. However, once I accepted that I too would lose everything to 'follow' the hummingbird and salamander,  I finished it in a couple of hours. Love Vandermeer. Cannot wait to read more of his stuff.

Kiersten

Maurice FitzGerald

I had a suspicion it was like this. You hear about all these authors trying to sell books winning awards and getting on lists and you think there must have been some winnowing down. Surely they can find fifty good books to put on a list. Nope not even close. This book is an affront. This book has a man writing as a kinda manly women for no reason. She want to live off grid is presented as some morsel of real life some everybody else has thought. All the observation aren't even on the level of a sitcom. The interior life of the person is just not there. She just gets annoyed at thing and likes to talk about it. ugh....

I feel torn! Beautiful writing, as always, but I never emotionally connected to the story or characters.

After taking months to get started, the plot finally gripped me at the halfway point, and I couldn't put the book down. I remained curious and engaged but not entirely invested.

I feel torn! Beautiful writing, as always, but I never emotionally connected to the story or characters.

After taking months to get started, the plot finally gripped me at the halfway point, and I couldn't put the book down. I remained curious and engaged but not entirely invested.

Cena

Torn on this one. There’s some amazing writing here and believably creepy world building, but I didn’t completely connect with it.

Boothby

This was an interesting one, and I liked the experience of reading most of it. But the paranoia wasn't as well executed as it was in Authority. I think maybe the issue was that there were two modes that the narrative switches between: a) paranoia that's so slow-burn that there are few to no external signs that Jane's convoluted reasoning and track covering is going anywhere, or b) suddenly a bunch of goons are shooting at Jane or kidnapping her. Nothing in between. However, there were some truly breathtaking set pieces that are going to linger in my mind for a while. Vibes.

Interesting idea. Confusing read. But intriguing. 

Brian Alderman

Ethan Hill

There's something beautiful about a novel delivering perfectly on what it's premise promises. So if an eco-mystery/thriller with heavy noir influences that kind of drags between the 2nd and 3rd acts but has a really compelling (or is it confusing??) conclusion than this is the book for you!

If not... well maybe skip this one.

Cindy Lieberman

3.5 rounded up for this cli-fi (climate fiction) mystery novel. The protagonist is complex and interesting if not likeable. It starts when she discovers someone has left a rare hummingbird for her. A recently dead yet taxidermically prepared one. The salamander appears later…

Mark Wadley

I went in blind and this one surprised me. A tight, tense, noirish mystery that still has a lot of time for Jeff VanderMeer’s major themes — human impact on nature, culture in decline, Weird Shit™. I’m not a VanderMeer completist, but his Southern Reach trilogy had a massive impact on my taste & writing during a crucial development period. While I’ve enjoyed his other work (both pre- and post-Southern Reach), it hasn’t always hit the same way. But this book came very close.

While there are some clear speculative elements here, it’s a dark, violent mystery first, which I love. Chandler & Pynchon may be obvious references, but I’m also getting O’Connor & Faulkner, reminding me of underrated southern crime writers like Tom Franklin and John Biguenet.

VanderMeer is great at writing interesting, morally complex narrators who give the reader a view into totally alien worlds. The difference — and strength — here is how grounded and believable Hummingbird’s world is, while still being a massive departure from the narrator’s daily life. This book doesn’t have the fireworks of Annihilation or the outre weirdness of the Ambergris stories, but does an incredible job of telling an intricate, exciting, grounded story with light but fascinating speculative touches, and that’s a lot harder to pull off. Killer book.

Sunyi Dean

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher and the author for the free copy, in exchange for an honest review. 

THis is the first non-speculative Vandermeer book I have read; the rest are SFF to some degree (as far as I know.) Some parts of it I loved, and some parts I struggled with, but I overall found the book a really positive and engaging read. It's beautifully written, full of paranoia and sadness and love for the natural world, and has an intriguing main character who is difficult because she is so uncompromising. 

For the areas I struggled with, I think this was largely down to expectation. The book is billed as an eco thriller, but it doesn't really meet my internal definitions of thriller, and I'm not sure it would meet industry ones either? I spent a year reading commercial thrillers to prepare for writing a thriller myself, and my understanding was that thrillers have a certain kind of structure. In HS, very few of the MC's plot goals are accomplished in the way that she hopes, put it that way, and the structure is sprawling rather than corseted. 

When I let go of the idea that this was meant to be a thriller, and read it more as a deeply literary meditation on the collapse of civilisation as part of the aftermath of humanity's destruction of the natural world, then I found I enjoyed it much more. I stopped expecting certain plot point to unfold in certain ways, and could just embrace the book for what it was trying to do, and what it was trying to say. 

In that sense, I approached Hummingbird much as I approached Dead Astronauts: by letting go of the proverbial wheel and trusting Vandermeer to present something artistic and unusual, a liminal book that defied its own supposed structure.

Joseph Keenan

Of all Vandermeer’s longer novels, this one is, for me, the one where his environmentalist message rings most clearly, but is also his least captivating. It felt hard to follow the motivation that drove the protagonist, which made the detective story structure hard to engage with, and thus it dragged from around the midpoint, before kicking in at the end with some of that grand sense of awe he does so well. 

Daryl Houston

I really liked VanderMeer's Annihilation, though I thought the other two in that trio were lesser books. So I was really keen to try another. I didn't read the jacket copy and figured it'd be sci-fi, and maybe it sort of had elements of sci-fi here and there. But mostly it felt like an overwrought attempt to write sort of a hard-boiled detective novel. It really did not work for me. I skimmed the last third or so of the novel.

Jeremy Cote

** spoiler alert **
           Note: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley.

This book was quite interesting, but it didn't quite get there for me. I found the story had a bunch of elements that I thought I was going to like, but the whole story didn't hang together well for me. That's not to say the story isn't good. It just wasn't for me. I really liked the name of the purse (Shovel Pig is an amazing name), and I thought the themes and the narrator's angle were intriguing. It just didn't hit home for me as well as it could have. There were a lot of unexplained motives in the book that just confused me and didn't have me rooting for the character.

I will say this: The ideas alluded to in the book are good. Climate change, the chance of having no privacy, and the destruction of the world are important ideas. It just did not do it for me in this story.

Hummingbird Salamander A Novel