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Vanilla and Chocolate: A Review of Beyond the Burn Line [1]

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Date: 2023-02-16  

Beyond the Burn Line feels like it is two novels that the author didn't really know how to make into novel length and so mashed them together.

Now, that is not entirely fair. The end of the second half of the book does clear up a mystery established in the first half of the book, but that mystery isn't all that compelling. Furthermore it's solution is not established very well so it feels a bit deux ex machina. Which is a bit of a shame, because the two parts by themselves are pretty interesting.

The first part is the story of a scholar in a society of intelligent racoons sometime after humanity has gone and offed itself. Ostensibly, the story is about his attempt to complete his maser's work on what the racoons calls "visitors" -- what might be delusions, or aliens, or something else entirely. What the first part of the book is really about is a society that is run on the idea that conflict is bad and that everyone should attempt to get along and care for each other. The main character, in fact, is punished for what we would consider to be self-defense, or at least defense of his property. But in his society, valuing property over another person's physical wellbeing is just as wrong as theft.

It is a fascinating intellectually exercise, especially as the book interrogates the concept as it is honored as the society deals with women now want equal rights and a quasi-industrial revolution that provides material abundance in a manner that allows for the outsiders -- woman, those who do not go into heat (clear analog for non-traditional sexual roles in our society) -- to question tradition and the costs, good and bad, that questioning extracts.

But then that part of the book ends with the discovery that the visitors are humans and a decade and a half time jump.

The second half of the book focuses on the human society and a political thriller encasing questions of colonialism, redemption, and ecological rebirth. But, again, the story isn't given a ton of space to really breath with those ideas. The need to tie it back to the first half of the book artificially, in my opinion, reduces that space even further.

All of the above makes me sound as if I did not like the book. I did, actually. Each half was enjoyable while it lasted. Well written, good characters, and the racoon society is a nifty intellectual exercise that blends nicely into the story. But it feels as if I asked for ice cream and got two scoops, neither of which were big enough.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/16/2153036/-Vanilla-and-Chocolate-A-Review-of-Beyond-the-Burn-Line

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