Hello friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all doing well! Today I’m posting my review of Catherine Leroux’s novel The Future.

This book was short-listed (and the winner) of Canada Reads 2024.
This book has been translated from French by Susan Ouriou.

The Future by: Catherine Leroux: Taking place in an alternate reality of Detroit, Fort Détroit, where it never gave itself away to the U.S., weaves a tale of orphaned children fighting for survival in their own kingdom in the trees where they make the rules. It’s here that Gloria finds herself when on the hunt for her lost grandchildren. This started as a moving and interesting novel, but as the reader dove deeper, it got stranger and they stopped to wonder if they understood what was happening. This novel is separated into four parts and the first part was very emotionally driven and fast-paced. We meet our main character Gloria and we realize her grandchildren are missing; it’s a little reflective as she thinks about her own daughter and her upbringing and the lost communication and just the relationship she had with her. It was such a great way to open the novel because it left the reader wanting to know more about Gloria, and if she was going to find these two young girls. We enter the second part and it’s no longer in Gloria’s point of view but in a third person narration of these children who live within the woods and take care of themselves. What the reader liked was the closeness and the bonds they had with each other, and how they protected each other. What they didn’t like, was how jumbled it felt to read. We jumped from person to place a lot trying to get a feel for this place, and we just never got there because this reader couldn’t keep anything straight. Then when we entered the third part and it’s a combination of the third person narration and Gloria’s point of view and it felt even more miss-mashed because there was too much going on. On top of this, this felt overwritten; things were over-described, which made it hard to keep reading. The reader wonders if this is because it was translated because it felt too wordy. This probably could have been a great novel, but because there were too many voices and words clouding up the story, it made it hard to follow and hard to connect with. There were moments in between that felt worth-while, but overall, this novel didn’t fit with this reader. They appreciated what the author was trying to do and the story she wanted to tell because it sounded so intriguing, but it unfortunately didn’t come through for this reader.