Reading ClaireBadger’s review of 84K reminded me of how much I enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August last year, and I was inspired to move another of her novels to the top of my TBR list. I’m happy to say I was not disappointed, as The Sudden Appearance of Hope was every bit as much mind-bending fun.
As Hope says on the first page, the world began to forget her when she was sixteen years old: first her teachers, then her friends, and finally her parents, too. Unable to remain in her own home, unable to hold any kind of job, Hope turns to crime in order to survive. She starts small, stealing food and picking pockets, but she eventually moves on to bigger and bigger jobs, becoming an internationally renowned jewel thief, famous for her brazen acts of theft in plain sight, forever elusive until she starts to make mistakes, getting too cocky or too emotionally involved, as she does when she decides to steal a set of famous diamonds at a party for elite members of Perfection, a lifestyle app that rewards people who change everything about themselves and spend their way to an ideal state of crowd-sourced perfection. Instead of walking away and licking her wounds, Hope becomes embroiled in a plot to destroy Perfection from the inside and save humanity from its own worst impulses, even though all she wants is to become memorable.
This feels very much like a companion piece to Harry August in style and tone, as North again plays with time and reality and memory, though in very different ways. Hope might be a bit messier, but it’s also more ambitious, if that’s even possible, and I enjoyed it just as much. Starting off like a heist book, it morphs again and again, straddling multiple genres throughout, but North gets away with it by keeping the focus on Hope. We’re inside her head as she tells her own story, allowing us to see how she deals with not being able to form relationships with anyone, how such extreme solitude affects her, and how hard she has to fight to keep herself from descending into madness. I also loved the whole Perfection storyline, as North savagely rails against the banality of our image-obsessed culture and our willingness to exchange money, privacy, and humanity for empty promises of impossible ideals. Claire North isn’t afraid to take on big questions — does anything we say or do matter if no one remembers? what kind of ethical obligations do we owe a world that refuses to acknowledge our existence? who gets to decide what’s real and what’s ideal? — and she again proves her ability to deliver on a high-concept premise from beginning to end.