In the near future, diplomats are Faces and their handlers do much of the moving and shaking. In Genevieve Valentine’s fast paced novel Persona, Suyana Sapaki is that “Face” who represents the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation collective of nations in the International Assembly (presumably something into which the United Nations evolves). These Faces have more of a celebrity status than diplomats do today, which is why Daniel Park is trying to “snap” photographs of her. Daniel is actually a Snap, the equivalent to paparazzi and when an attempt is made on Suyana’s life, Daniel crosses the line and gets involved in the situation and tries to save her. From that early scene, Valentine takes the characters (and readers) on a fast paced game of subterfuge and political chess where players continually try to outmaneuver each other.
Early in their relationship, Daniel and Suyana aren’t quite sure what to make of each other. They reveal very little of themselves to each other and subsequently, to us as the readers. For me, this withholding of information helped to increase the dramatic tension in the novel, when tension was already at a palpable high. Park is hesitant to reveal that he’s a Snap and Suyana is even more hesitant to get close to the man who helped to save her or even have him following her.
Valentine intersperses the fast paced thriller narrative with flashbacks of Suyana’s past which led her to where we first met her in the beginning of the novel. When Suyana attempts to evade Daniel who reluctantly brings her to at the hospital to tend to her injuries she realizes he’s not going anywhere. So, she takes him underground when her handler falsely and very publicly reveals Suyana has been kidnapped. There’s no turning back at that point and Valentine manages to reveal multiple layers while keeping a frenetic pace. However, there were times the transition from present to flashback and flashback to present felt a bit jarring to me and it took flipping back a page or two for me to regain my footing in the story.
It has been a while since I turned the pages as quickly as I did while reading Persona. Granted, the book itself is one of the shorter (in height) hard covers and has a page count of just over 300 pages. Even having said that, I started reading the book on a Friday and finished it early Saturday evening. It isn’t often that I breeze through a brook over the course of two days.
Persona has thin genre ties so readers should be more prepared for a political thriller with some near future elements. By no means is this a slight, because Persona is very effective as a thriller. The Twenty Minutes from Now setting and great characters very much reminded me of Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising. Of course, Valentine’s novel is doing some things differently and has some different goals, but the two novels could easily sit side by side as examples of science fiction crossing into the thriller novel. I haven’t (yet) read the other launch titles form Saga Press, but with Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings (Epic Fantasy), Lee Kelly’s City of Savages (Post Apocalypse), and Zachary Brown’s The Darkside War (Military SF) novel, it seems Saga is saying that the most important element of their publishing plan is quality be it for more “hard-core” genre novels or those with simply genre flavors. Persona has a broad appeal that will invite readers who may not dip their toes into the genre with regularity to take longer, more considered swims in its waters. In the end, Persona seems a smart novel to help launch a new SF imprint.
© 2015 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover, March 2015, 320 Pages
ISBN 978-1-481-42512-4
http://www.genevievevalentine.com/
Sample Chapter http://www.tor.com/stories/2015/02/persona-excerpt-genevieve-valentine
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Saga Press
The light genre touch kind of frustrated me a little. I wanted a little more of that old time religion, as it were. It’s a damn fine thriller, though.