Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (4 stars)

This is a really entertaining read. The world building is excellent, and Zinzi December is a great character. The dash of magic into the gritty Johannesburg setting works really well. The idea of being 'animalled' for crimes is very creative and well executed. I totally bought the burden and social stigma of being an "Apo" (Aposymbiot), the Zoo City ghetto, and Zinzi's dark side scamming innocents out of their life savings with 419 emails.

I found the transition from "I don't do missing persons" to being a private eye a little under-explained. I think the author intended to show Zinzi getting sucked into the investigation reluctantly, but it didn't read like that, I never really got an insight into her motivations. But generally I liked that many aspects of the world weren't explained, it kept a real air of mystery to the story, i.e what crimes warrant an animal? What is the Undertow? What are the properties of the connection to the animal?

Beukes takes an interesting approach to filling in details, she does it with a number of factual interstitials: IMDB entries, newspaper articles etc. I liked this idea: some of them were really well written and revealed detail in clever ways, others (like the IMDB entry and comments) were fairly annoying to read but still very believable.

The writing is really good, full of ironic humour and witticisms:

All it takes is one Afgan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they knew goes right out the window.

Some people have complained that the good guys don't win cleanly. I hate those sorts of endings, and while there is some raggedness to this ending I felt like the opposite, that most things got wrapped up a little too neatly. The climax also feels rather rushed and broke with the dark mysterious feel of the rest of the book for a Van-Damme-style finish. Contrast the brilliantly written off-balance dirty fight in the sewers with the final scenes: I wish the climax had been more in the style of the former.

Some more choice quotes:

Nzambe aza na zamba te. God is not in the forest. Maybe He is too busy looking after sports teams or worrying about teenagers having sex before marriage. I think they take up a lot of His time.

They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow.

4 stars.