Review: The Only Harmless Great Thing

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was fortunate to receive an Advance Reader Copy of this book.

I'm going to need a word count for my 2018 Hugo nominations in order to know whether this is a novelette (as I suspect) or a novella (what so many other people are saying).

This very affecting, slender book was so emotionally powerful that I set it aside for a bit half way because I kept crying while reading it. A story about dangerous, terrible lies, both the ones others tell us to use us as fodder, and the ones we tell ourselves to just barely get by. It is also about injustice and abuse that was real, read Kate Moore's Radium Girls and astonishingly cruel and grotesque human abuse of an animal, see Electrocuting an Elephant which shows the fate of the real-life Topsy, who was killed because she had killed an evil man who deliberately burnt her tail with a lit cigar. (I'd be unmanageable too if people took pleasure in burning me with lit cigars, wouldn't you?)

This book is like a prose poem about human brutality and injustice. Brooke Bolander's writing has already received acclaim, but this... this fierce and searing story is in another league.

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