The Mother Code by Carole Stivers

From the publisher: It’s 2049, and the survival of the human race is at risk. Earth’s inhabitants must turn to their last resort: a plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots—to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order—an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right—the Mother Code. In a future that could be our own, The Mother Code explores what truly makes us human—and the tenuous nature of the boundaries between us and the machines we create.

The Mother Code has a terrific premise, but it didn’t quite live up to its promise for me. The military releases a bioweapon that causes a global pandemic. In a desperate attempt to save humanity, a fleet of robots is launched containing genetically engineered embryos. The robots are coded with the personalities of the real women who donated eggs to the project. The robots disperse, the babies are incubated inside them and born, and the mother robots raise the children. A core group of military strategists given an antidote survive the pandemic, along with pockets of naturally resistant humans like the Hopi. Years pass as the children grow up and the team of humans tries to find them.

The Mother Code is very readable and moves along at a brisk pace. I totally bought into the sequence of events at the beginning. However, as it moved toward the end I felt the plot twists were too Hollywood-esque. The narrative tension felt artificial.

I never felt I got to know the kids, who read like a casting call for a movie: the combative natural leader; the meditative naturalist who communes with snakes; the reckless tomboy; the shy mouse; the boy with almond-shaped eyes who is good at cooking; the black girl who starts a garden. In fact overall this entire book reads like a detailed movie script, and indeed Steven Spielberg has optioned the movie rights.

The overall message of what it means to be a mother seemed very labored by the end. If you are looking for a fast-moving thriller that reads like an action movie, The Mother Code may be for you. As a book that will truly make a reader think, that’s perilously close to something that could happen in real life, the book is not quite as successful.

I read an advance reader copy of The Mother Code. It is scheduled to be published in May 2020 and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library in print and as an ebook.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

“How did I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.” – Sam Spade

The Maltese Falcon is the Galesburg Public Library's 2015 Big Read title. I had never read it or seen the movie before this year. They were both much funnier than I expected, and I enjoyed them both. About all I knew about noir was from listening to Guy Noir on the Prairie Home Companion, and it has been interesting learning more about the genre.

I read a lot of mysteries and detective fiction and should have read The Maltese Falcon long ago. It’s a quick read with spare text, and I found it highly entertaining.

The library will be hosting four book discussions of The Maltese Falcon in the month of April. Come join us for one of them! 

Thursday         4/9        6:30 pm      Civic Art Center

Tuesday          4/14      1:00 pm       upstairs at the library

Wednesday     4/15     12:20 pm     Carl Sandburg College Library

Thursday         4/30     11:30 am     En Season Restaurant ($10 for lunch)

Unlike some of my friends and coworkers, I was not a huge Laura Ingalls Wilder fan growing up. I read the Little House books, but I don’t remember them having a big impact on my childhood reading. Laura Ingalls Wilder is woven into the literary mystery that is the plot of Bich Minh Nguyen’s novel Pioneer Girl.

Narrator Lee Lien is the daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants. Her father is dead; her mother and grandfather run a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. Lee has disappointed her mother by getting a PhD in literature instead of something more practical. She continues to disappoint her mother by searching for work in her field, instead of resigning herself to the family business.

Lee is jealous of her older brother, who she sees as her mother’s favorite, and complains about her mother constantly. The family has an heirloom and a story. In 1965 a woman named Rose visited her grandfather’s café in Saigon and left behind a small gold pin. The pin sounds like a gift given to Laura Ingalls Wilder by her fiancé and described in one Wilder’s books. Lee becomes obsessed with trying to discover whether the Rose from the family story was Wilder’s daughter Rose.

There are some great passages in Pioneer Girl. There is a spot-on description of American “Chinese” buffets at the start of Chapter Three and this musing on small towns in the Midwest:

Mansfield, Missouri reminded me of how the past will not be banished. So many small, dying, basically dead towns in the Midwest looked like this. Where once-graceful, ornate courthouses and libraries – back when libraries meant something important, something civic – had been, if not torn down or boarded up, converted dozens of times over into shops and offices and apartments and barely surviving historical societies. There might even be the remains of an ambitious opera house. The nicest building in town was likely to be a funeral home.

Main Street had been built broad, to accommodate horses, buggies, and hitching posts. And surely local efforts tried to preserve the “historic downtown” area. Surely there were sad little parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. In Mansfield a few local “shoppes” offered “olde-fashioned ice cream” and “sewing notions,” but it looked like most of the money was flowing in and out of the paycheck advance and pawn shops. (p. 140)

Still, I had some issues with the novel. The narrator is not very likeable. In addition to being a whiner, she is a thief. While doing research, she steals a photograph, a letter and a book. She talks about racism, ignorance about Asian culture, and stereotyping, but she herself stereotypes, and not in a self-aware manner.

A small band of researchers squinted over Hoover’s notes and newspapers, setting up cameras on tabletop tripods to record their findings. They were a standard lot – frumpy and frowning, pallid and disheveled. (p. 76)

At times I felt that the author was judging the Midwest and finding it wanting (and once the narrator refers to the University of Illinois as “UI,” something no true U of I graduate would ever do). There is a random, out-the-blue sex scene between Lee and someone she just met that seemed pointless.

However, especially in light of recent high profile cases in the U.S. of unarmed black men being killed by white police officers, the themes of this book are quite timely, and I loved the book’s cover. If you are a fan of literary mysteries or novels dealing with stereotyping and race in America, you may find Pioneer Girl an interesting read.