Emotional prose and distinctive characters highlight an incredible story that will touch readers’ hearts and minds ... A compelling tale of invasive occupation and emotional uprising, Turnbull’s debut is complex and enthralling. It’s a must for all libraries, and the writer, who crafts speculative stories with black characters on par with Octavia Butler, is definitely one to watch.
... combines a solid, modest gravitas, a homey quotidian ambiance, a sophistication of character development, and some genuine SFnal strangeness into a unique and savory gumbo ... A native of the region before taking up residence in the USA, Turnbull has the setting and citizens of St. Thomas in his bones and blood, and he conveys their reality to us gracefully, colorfully and with a minimum of hand-holding ... Turnbull illustrates life on the island and the patterns of culture that contribute to the climactic mini-apocalypse with sensitivity and flair. He charts the personal arcs of his characters with insight and ingenuity ... Ultimately, this deft, low-key, exacting, surprising, yet predestined story assumes the contours of the classic account of two cultures at cross-purposes, misunderstanding each other through a welter of good and bad intentions, tragedy resulting.
Turnbull’s light touch here is effective: the connection he draws between historical Caribbean slavery and alien occupation is firm and unsparing, but unsentimental. The fevered heroics of alien invasion stories and human resistance can be thrilling; sometimes, though, they read like a sleeper waking from a nightmare and re-litigating the dream, convincing themselves it (colonization, enslavement) wouldn’t happen to them, not that way. Turnbull is more interested in probing the complexities of resistance, what it means to answer violence with violence and what these cycles signify to occupiers and rebels alike ... Turnbull’s honesty here is important: the world we’d like to see, that we think is so obviously a better one, is hard to get to, because it leaves out the need for reckoning, symmetry, satisfaction that drives our sense of justice.
If Frantz Fanon had written War of the Worlds, he might have produced something like The Lesson ... Turnbull gives the reader a visceral sense of what it might feel like to live as a colonized body, for those of us with the privilege not to: a life of queasy, oppressive helplessness; a constant low-grade fear and anger that sits at the back of the head like a tension headache always ready to flare ... There are no simple heroes or villains in the story, for the most part. Turnbull allows the reader to see the full range of their humanity, in all its knotty complexity ... One of Turnbull’s brilliant conceits is to jump back in time periodically to show the reader harrowing visions of the Virgin Islands’ history of violent occupation ... does something more complicated than imagine a brave resistance against an invading force or humans learning to coexist in harmony with a misunderstood alien species. The Lesson is concerned with the experience of dehumanization under the project of colonialism. What if the arrival of alien life wasn’t the future, but just another recapitulation of our bloody past? ... Turnbull shows with heartbreaking clarity that even when fundamentally different individuals are able to find an essential humanity in each other, the nature of colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized.
By employing and subverting first contact tropes, Turnbull explores and interrogates theme of colonialism and violence—specifically how violence can be used both to oppress and to resist, and what that does to a society and to people, whether they are the victims or perpetrators of that violence—but it is not the paint-by-numbers allegory the log line might suggest. At every turn, he drills deeper, anchoring his story in the real history of St. Thomas ... For all the story’s thoughtfulness and literary depth, The Lesson is given a sharp edge through Turnbull’s refusal to flinch from portraying the true consequences and costs of invasion, violence and resistance. Rather than simply pitting heroic humans against dastardly aliens, he does something much more interesting, laying bare the flaws and strengths in individuals on both sides. The stakes are high for both the Ynaa and the humans, and in the end, no society nor individual will come out clean in such a confrontation.
Every character has at least a few good moments, but the book starts to feel like a literary scrapyard toward its end, full of pieces of stories rather than a smooth narrative. The story of the book is less an agile plot than it is a series of shifts in the lives of these characters. Key events occur, but how the characters absorb and react to these events makes the plot feel a little sparse. No matter. Turnbull’s writing is affecting and intelligent, dropping wisdom like cherry bombs ... The Lesson isn’t symmetrical or geometric, but messy, driven by decisions and relationships. That makes it much more human. The trouble with allegories is how circumscribed by purpose they often feel. Nothing that doesn’t fit the allegory can go in the book. The Lesson does not have that problem; its events occur organically, and the book’s nature comes clear only gradually ... In craft, The Lesson is hardly a perfect book. It has false starts (the opening makes it seem like a YA book), it juggles its many characters with less than ideal grace (Patrice, characterized inconsistently, has a convenient, low-stakes pregnancy), and its vague gestures to how the world beyond St. Thomas deals with the Ynaa’s existence are not enough to fully contexualize the event. But it’s a daring and thoughtful book, which is far better than a beautifully crafted snoozer. Moreover, it’s a book that presents racial issues and questions in a genuinely new way, which makes it a book that, I hope, will stand the test of time.
Turnbull artfully incorporates the history of slavery and colonialism on the U.S. Virgin Islands into the story, imagining that history’s legacy on a future in which it’s hard to differentiate between the cruel nature of man and alien. The Lesson is an impressive first book that takes a classic science fiction archetype and makes it feel new.
Turnbull uses a beautifully drawn cast of black characters to convey the complexity of ordinary hardship in extraordinary times. This is an ideal story for fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and other literary science fiction novels.
