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"Landscape With Invisible Hand," by M.T. Anderson



M.T. Anderson is one of my favorite YA writers. Teen and children’s librarians who have worked with me know that I’m always recommending his book Feed. In that book, which takes place in a near-future, the Internet is implanted in your brain so that you get a near-constant stream of advertisements and sites that the Internet has deemed perfect for you. Like Google or Facebook, but directly to your brain. (As I like to tell the teens, it’s happening now!)

So, I was glad to pick up one of his latest books, and not just because it’s short (149 pages). Landscape With Invisible Hand imagines a future in which we have been invaded by an alien race—the Vuvv—who sold us on their advanced technology. We welcomed them at first. But then some rich people got richer and the rest of us got very poor (most jobs were lost to the advanced tech) and often sick (the aliens stopped treating our water, so water-borne diseases are common-place and only a few can afford the Vuvv medicine).

One little side note, as I was reading this I kept thinking how odd that Anderson named the alien race the Vuvv, thinking that was the name of the alien race in the amusing children's book The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. But, no. Rex’s aliens are the Boov. Now I’d like to see a little more imagination with alien races, guys.

In this dystopian novella, our alien invaders are enamored with all things from mid-century America. That’s when they first started observing us. One way to make money is to pretend you’re having a chaste 1950s style romance and have it broadcast to the Vuvv. Our protagonist Adam does that for a short time before he comes to hate the girl he’s pretending to woo. Adam is great. He’s a landscape artist and he too has nostalgia – not for the 1950s, but for the Earth as it was. Adam is also very sick from all the bad water, so the book does not shy away from gastrointestinal self-deprecation.

My favorite line in the book is one Adam says near the very end: “When a guy is holding up enough red flags, he’s just speaking to you in semaphore.” It’s self-deprecating (again), which is Adam’s way of coping and, in real life, it’s a warning lots of us should take to heart. He has a brilliant scheme to get his family out of poverty and it seems to be working in the final pages.

In just 149 pages, there’s not much room for character development, but Adam, his mom and his younger sister are all nicely drawn in the space they’re allotted. The plot is well-thought-out too (building to a medical crisis and art contest climax that gives Adam his life-saving idea). The humor in it reminded me a bit of Patrick Ness’s The Rest of Us Just Live Here (another light dystopian novel). I’d recommend it to teens in a heartbeat.

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