Seven years after her arrest and six years after her escape, the last midwife with the training to perform an abortion has the opportunity to take down the para-military organization that imprisoned her and
committed horrific crimes, and potentially the opportunity to reunite with the sons she was separated from years before. Mae Bastet’s story is bloody, a dark mirror of what the world has become and how the world has always been when it comes to policing women’s bodies.
I feel a lot more mixed on this than I thought I would going into it, and honest a lot more mixed than I thought I would be for most of the book, because I found it pretty solid and engaging for the most part. Buzzard is deeply disturbing, both in the ways that the world seems so different from ours and in the ways it seems so similar. Regardless of the current legality of abortion in the present, there are people right now that believe abortion should be handled the way that it is in Mae’s time and place, and that alone should make you angry. In that sense, I think this is an important story and I want it to be told, but I’m just not sure the execution was where I wanted it to be.
The obvious comparison is The Handmaid’s Tale, but without saying one is better or worse I can tell you that this book is very different. Part of what made The Handmaid’s Tale eerie (and also not particularly exciting) is the lack of action—the banality of most of the events of the book. It’s disturbing because it makes the twisted system of the dystopia seem normal, because in some ways it is normal to the characters. Buzzard is a lot more action-focused, with a lot more on-page violence. This makes it more engaging but also a little shallow-feeling. There isn’t much left up to interpretation thematically, and to me that made the messaging of the book kind of unsatisfying. Some of the scenes come off as shock-horror because there isn’t space for reflection.
The world is a little confusing at points. It’s not clear to me what the relationship between all of these factions are or exactly what Obsityan’s ultimate goal is. One unfortunate side effect of having an action-forward plot with a character who suffers very deeply from trauma is that we don’t really get a sense of Mae’s personality outside of her being traumatized, which makes it hard to feel entirely invested in her. We don’t really get levels in the book—it’s pretty much bad all the time, which makes sense but also costs it impact. If there were brief moments of joy or moments where it seemed like things were working out, those dark moments would have felt so much more powerful by contrast. I have the same issue with cozy books—if there isn’t both good and bad, the whole thing feels very one-note. I’m not really sure what to make of the ending. I didn’t personally find it hopeful because at no point along the way have we seen an indication that this could work out. There are also a lot of storylines that we get no resolution to—most obviously Sona, but even Danger and Sunny. I’m not saying we need every character’s story tied up with a neat bow, but we basically only get a vague ending to the story of Mae and one of her sons.
I also have to mention it because this is the second book I’ve read in the last month to do something like this (looking at you The Lord of the Wood). About 80% of the way into this book out of nowhere the term “unalived” shows up. On top of immediately taking you out of the otherwise very serious story, it makes no sense for Mae to be using a slang term from the 2020s in the year 2080. The equivalent would be if I were in an incredibly dangerous and high-stakes situation, finding out that someone I care about has just put themself in danger, and said “This isn’t groovy at all, dude!” Why? What was the reason??
This is an engaging, effectively upsetting story about an important subject. I just wish it had the execution that could have made it a good book and not just an important one.
Thank you to Inez Ray and Bindery Books for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!
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