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Synopsis:
Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.
The border cuts you in two.
When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.
Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.
She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.
How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?
Review:
The novel Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim starts with an intriguing premise. The idea is that when people cross a border, they split into two, one staying home and one going to their destination. Meeting and touching the other version of yourself is the way the two selves can merge back into one, but the idea is that most of the people do not do this. They become separate identities that sometimes even are close on the phone or over video chat. The two versions do not live in the same consciousness but there are things that are similar, like shared memories of before they split and like playing strategy games online as a team because they instinctively make the same decisions. While many of the people live far enough from each other to where touching again and remerging is something that does not accidentally happen, many still have plans to remerge later in life or not at all. This is where technology companies make wearable tech that allows the two instances of the same person to be close to each other and protect them in case they accidentally touch, as long as both buy and wear the tech that will prevent them from rejoining.
With this as the landscape, the story starts as a family drama. Soyoung lives in South Korea. Rose, her instance, lives in New York. Both have separate lives, and they do not really talk much. When their grandfather dies, Rose travels back to South Korea to attend the funeral. At this time, she remembers her childhood, and seeing her instance in person starts a whole unraveling of who she is and the identity that she has curated for herself after the separation. The novel is constantly morphing from family drama to corporate thriller to romance to morality tale. Each part of this is interesting in it’s own way, but the best pieces are the history of this phenomenon, something that did not just start happening with the world changing and people travelling more but something that has been going on since the beginning of time. There are retellings of historical and religious events throughout the novel that not only explains that this has been happening forever but has changed the way that the whole world has been developed. Even the earliest literature, with Homer’s Odyssey and the story of Adam, Eve, and the fall of man, are rewritten with an instance in mind. Kim uses these stories as a parallel to the events of the novel, as if she is saying that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them, but she has to make sure that the old stories fit into this world and are told in the right way.
The ideas in this novel are intriguing, and the way that she explains and uses these ideas are interesting. I do like the characters that she picks to tell a specific story with the the instances, and I really enjoy the beginning with Soyoung and Rose navigating the relationship that they have never built due to their separate lives. Unfortunately the entire novel does not rely on the strength of this unsteady relationship and switches focus on the bigger picture, specifically how corporations and the government can continue to use technology and money to find a way to control people who are continuing to split into two when crossing borders. I would not hate reading another novel set in this world, with some new characters navigating this global structure because it is the characters and the smaller stories that are more interesting than the government and the corporate response.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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