Welcome back to Back Shelf Sundays, where I review backlist titles I never got around to reading when they released. Today’s book, Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth, is just squeaking by as a backlist title, with a release date of February 21st, 2023.
Arch-Conspirator bills itself as a dystopian novella and as a retelling of Sophocles’s classic play, Antigone. Honestly, I didn’t need to hear anything more to know I wanted to read this book. As a long-time fan of Roth’s work and a lover of speculative novellas, Arch-Conspirator feels like it was written just for me. With this novella, Roth has created a tyrannical dystopian world, a feminist sci-fi masterpiece, and a piercing retelling of the classic play.
The Blurb:
From dystopian visionary and bestselling phenomenon Veronica Roth comes a razor-sharp reimagining of Antigone. In Arch-Conspirator, Roth reaches back to the root of legend and delivers a world of tomorrow both timeless and unexpected.
Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end.
Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but Antigone’s parents were murdered, leaving her father’s throne vacant. As her militant uncle Kreon rises to claim it, all Antigone feels is rage. When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest.
But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.
Review:
I have read much of Roth’s works over the years; more than anything, her superb writing keeps me returning. Her writing works for me on so many levels; her tone is frank, her dialogue is endlessly engaging, and her worlds build casually through her storytelling. There is no info-dumping when it comes to Veronica Roth. I’m pleased to say that the same held true with Arch-Conspirator. In fact, it appears that Roth’s writing only gets better with time and as she experiments with her writing style.
Arch-Conspirator is clever and sharp, equally balancing the responsibility of reworking Sophocles’s play and being a modern speculative work. Antigone, Ismene, Polyneikes, and Eteocles are the natural-born children of the formal leaders of the last city left on Earth. Outside the city. is a wasteland. Antigone and her siblings live with their cruel uncle, Kreon, after the death of their parents years before. Antigone and her siblings are unique, though. They are natural-born children in a world where children are only spiritually and socially acceptable if born in vitro from carefully chosen donors based on their genetics. To the people of this world, natural-born children are soulless, less-than, and genetically sick.
We were unique among our people, pieced together from whatever random combination of genes our two parents provided. Table-scrap children.
The women in this book are complex and distinct. Antigone, Ismene, and Eurydice each have their own voice and point of view chapters. In this, Roth has returned agency to characters who are otherwise caged in their city and to the whims of the men in their family. When death happens close to home and rebellion looms, Antigone charts her own course. In the wake of her choice, those in Antigone’s orbit must also make decisions about their futures and the world in which they want to live.
“We’re women. No one will think of us as a threat. No one will think of us at all.”
Those familiar with Roth’s previous works may know that she does not always create happy endings, as much as we readers may wish for them. Antigone has chosen her path; as she says, they were all doomed from the start.
Rating: 5/5 Stars. This guy is going on my Infinity Stars/Favorite shelf. Masterpiece level stuff here.
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