This fairy-tale register is just one of many modes of storytelling that seep into The Morningside. The book’s grimly familiar vision of the environmentally devastated near future places it alongside recent 'cli-fi' by Claire Vaye Watkins and Lydia Millet ... The narrative has the mysterious, intoxicating pull of classic children’s books...Sil’s story is an adventure that is at times so captivating that we can briefly forget that it’s an elegy ... Obreht doesn’t say exactly what those debts are—instead, she lets the diminished world of the novel, like the future our younger generations will face, speak for itself. It seems darkly appropriate that she wrote this novel while pregnant during the pandemic ... where flights of invention made The Tiger’s Wife tilt toward allegory, the textures of The Morningside—a familiar city, a familiar crisis, a familiar complacency—make this future feel closer, shot through with an almost excruciating intimacy. Here, storytelling is not a way of relating to a mythical past but of growing up in the long middest, when the idea of home and the promise of safety are harder and harder to hold on to every day.
Elegant, effortless world-building ... Immensely satisfying twists ... Throughout, I marveled at the subtle beauty and precision of Obreht’s prose ... By weaving in folklore and ample wonder, Obreht gives her climate fiction ancient roots, forcing us to reckon with the ruined world that future generations will inherit, while reminding us that even in the face of catastrophe, there’s solace to be found in art.
Try to read 10 pages of this book and resist its fairy dust. This story sinks the reader into its dreamlike world as surely as the Morningside subsides into the island it occupies ... Obreht is a pure, natural storyteller with a direct hotline to the collective unconsciousness. She blends humor and tragedy, warmth and grit, mystery and magic, constructing her plot out of human curiosity and connection. She writes like she belongs to some lineage of storytellers who entertained around campfires, with such surefootedness that a reader knows all the odd elements and striking characters she introduces will weave together into a haunting and meaningful tale. With reality growing uncannier by the day, we need a novelist like Obreht who can imagine the fortune of our species in a way that feels authentic. In the world she envisions, there is loss, but beauty remains.
As dire as its subject matter may be, however, Obreht never allows the book to fall into the easy traps of nihilism or pessimism. Its characters may be managing between apocalypses, but each carries their own variety of hope in the face of slow doom. Their struggle suggests that while this world may be lost, the people who live in it don’t have to be as long as they have art, magic, and one another.
As in The Tiger’s Wife, there’s surely a touch of autobiography here from an author who, as a child, left Yugoslavia with her own mother. Obreht has a visceral sense of the saving power of stories for people propelled into a perilous world ... [an] erratically paced novel, which eventually reveals itself to be laced with feints and detours. I initially thought The Morningside would appeal to young adults, too—with its gothic Alice in Wonderland sensibility—but as I read on, I began to worry that readers of any age might find it frustrating ... one wishes that its ethical crisis had more room to breathe. The lush, semi-magical moments that serve as the heart of Obreht’s previous novels risk looking like asides in this new one, which delivers several storylines and a final flurry of dramatic events.
Because Obreht’s characters are so vibrant and individualised, they are never ciphers for particular ways of being. In this novel, letting go and holding on have more in common than we – and the characters – think ... Though The Morningside could be called dystopian, to this reader it feels hopeful in the way it imagines the near future.
Well-wrought, charming, and quietly bent ... Obreht’s portrait of the city and its inhabitants is rich and granular ... This book is pure unpredictable but organically and esthetically coherent pleasure from start to finish.
With elements of folklore and magic realism, this novel contends with interesting philosophical questions such as the relationship between superstition, guilt, and grief. It is also a moving exploration of the immigrant's tale whereby the daughter must instruct the mother in their new world. An accomplished novel.
Obreht, the author of 2011’s Orange prizewinner The Tiger’s Wife, is from the former Yugoslavia. That fact becomes increasingly pertinent as The Morningside unfolds. Like The Tiger’s Wife, it is imbued with magical realism, but here it is done with a light touch. Are things really as strange as they seem? Or is this simply what a dying world looks like to a child? ... There is a pleasing fairytale tone to this tale, but it’s matched with a big, chunky plot. Obreht weaves together a number of storylines...it all comes together at the end, but in a way that feels rushed, like a slightly panicked afterthought ... More moving is the depiction of not-quite apocalypse, which our own future could well resemble. Sil’s mother reckons with the changes she’s seen over her lifetime: 'I realised that I’d brought you into life at a time when everyone else’s debts had come true,' she tells Sil. But eventually she accepts it: 'The past is immense. But it means less and less. So we go on without. And that’s fine, Sil. It’s fine.' I enjoyed the simplicity of her conclusion, typical of a book that is equal parts eerie and charming. It’s less dramatic than a plot to save the world—but it feels more authentic.
Unlike Ms. Obreht’s previous works, it is largely indistinguishable from the masses of other novels in its genre ... Though the novel dabbles in climate-change auguries and what it means to live as a migrant, it mostly dwells on Silvia’s coming-of-age from a sheltered, impressionable child—she is convinced that an enigmatic neighbor is a witch—to a girl confronted by real-world horrors. But the somewhat improvised plot is hard to pick out from the generic dystopian background it’s been placed upon ... What does interest Ms. Obreht? Emigration and dispossession; family dynamics and the burdens of ancestry; the relationship between folklore and modernity. What if she were to explore these subjects more directly and at greater depth, in a simple story that didn’t depend on a ready-made template? Such a book would be unique to this formidably gifted author.
...full of...enchanting characters ... While this is a story that could be enjoyed by younger readers, that does not in any way take away from the depth of feeling within it. In that sense, it could be regarded as a crossover novel in many ways, bridging the gaps between the real and the supernatural, the young and the old, the present and the past. It's the tension between these opposites which gives the novel its energy ... like the best contemporary writers, she asks fundamental questions of storytelling, narration, and truth. And these are, possibly, the most important questions a novelist can pose today.
Obreht’s award-winning 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife evoked the Balkan wars of the 1990s; here, it’s seemingly climate change that has driven the conflict that has turned the book’s protagonists into refugees. The result is dystopian fiction at its most unnervingly captivating — submerged highways, tree-colonised train tracks, wheeling flocks of urban cranes. But this is also an increasingly serious look at a future, both unimaginable and all too near at hand, where reasons to be hopeful are hard to come by—and yet where humanity continues to find a way.
The Morningside is less digressive than Obreht’s previous novels. Even so, the author similarly indulges in fleshing out robust backstories even for minor characters ... Similarly, while any novel narrated by an older version of the protagonist necessitates a kind of double vision, here there are problems of modulation ... At its best, Obreht’s usefully estranging novel has the power to reenchant the ordinary world.
Satisfyingly unsettling ... Soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own. Whether or not they ever face forcible displacement in their life, everyone at some point must confront their past. Obreht addresses this truism with startling freshness in this entertaining work.
An enthralling story ... Obreht draws upon plausible dystopian and postapocalyptic futures and strong elements from Serbian folktales, as well as magical realism. The result is a strange, almost dreamlike novel, distinctive for its memorable characters and beautiful writing.
Striking if scattered ... The plot arcs somewhat haphazardly between myth and reality, and the tone is a slippery mix of YA and literary fiction. Still, Obreht skillfully crafts this alternate world through Silvia’s determined efforts to make sense of both her present and her past, and adds deft touches of horror and magic along the way.
