After the amputation, she starts to agitate for better conditions. The injustice of how the upper deckers (the whiter folk) treat the lower deckers (the browner folk) makes Aster burn with anger. (I say nearly because people are surviving. The cold-caused by the lack of warmth and energy from Matilda’s pocket sun-has made conditions nearly intolerable on the lower decks. We meet her as she is amputating the foot of a young child, whose foot turned gangrenous from frostbite. In her extremely limited free time, she heals as much as she can with plants from her bodged together botanarium. She has to labor on the field decks with her relatives and deck mates. She is constantly harassed by the whiter guards. Not only do metaphors and some human behavior baffle her and not only did she lose her mother on the day of her birth, but Aster was born too brown and too far from the upper decks to pursue her talent for healing. But on top of all this wonderful diversity, An Unkindness of Ghosts has an intriguing conspiracy at its heart and the race to put right the wrong of the past is simply thrilling.Īster has always struggled to fit in. Reading about Aster (who might be on the spectrum) alone is worth the price of admission to this book. Instead, we have characters who are the next thing to asexual, have mental illnesses, or appear to be on the autism spectrum. Very few of the characters conform to traditional genre tropes. Solomon populated her novel with diverse characters, which I deeply love and appreciate. But in An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, everything comes to a head after Aster starts to investigate why her mother died on the day she was born. Unfortunately for everyone on the ship, their leaders are content to let Matilda float through space forever. Something went wrong with their home planet then something went wrong with the ship. Her world is the generational ship, Matilda, crammed with thousands of souls that live in a strict hierarchy based on skin color and desk level. Aster’s world is too small for all the people living in it.

An unkindness of ghosts characters