Linnea Kuuluvainen‘s debut novel The Thick of the Forest has been turning heads and scoring favourable reviews since its release earlier this year. The latest glowing review comes from the Suomen Kuvalehti magazine, that states that “Linnea Kuuluvainen’s debut novel immediately rises to the top of the charts of Finnish speculative fiction.”
The review goes on to praise the structure of the book and how it places itself in the tradition of the top dystopian and spe-fi literature: “There’s two different years in which things are happening in The Thick of the Forest, 2060 and 2084, a hardly coincidental wink at George Orwell [‘s 1984]. […] A good reference other than Orwell’s Oceania state is Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel an extreme regulation of reproductive rights carried out in the shadow of an ecocatastrophe has led to a complete collapse of women’s rights”.
The Thick of the Forest follows in fact the fates of two young women, Edla and Ingrid, on two different timelines in a scenario where nature has started fighting back against human exploitation and the forest has turned into a deadly force to be reckoned with. Mixing questions about environmentalism, love, right and wrong and mankind’s relationship with nature, Kuuluvainen‘s debut ” is still the best debut since Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water. Much can be expected from this author.”
Congratulations to the author!