This Great Hemisphere

A Novel

By: Mateo Askaripour

Narrated by: Emana Rachelle

“A thrilling page-turner.”—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Wildly imaginative.”—The Washington Post

“Askaripour soars.”—The Boston Globe

A rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt invisible. A powerful, captivating novel about how far we’ll go to protect the ones we love, and what happens when we resist the narratives others write about us.

Welcome to the Northwestern Hemisphere, 2529. An equally exciting and terrifying world born from the ashes of our own, where almost half of people are born invisible, and thus relegated to second-class citizenship. Sweetmint, a young invisible woman, has done everything right her entire life, from excelling in school to landing a highly sought-after apprenticeship with a mysterious, powerful inventor. But all she has fought so hard to earn comes crashing down when she learns that her missing brother, whom she had presumed dead, is not only alive and well but also the primary suspect of a high-profile political murder.

Armed with nothing more than courage, intellect, and unwavering love for her brother, Sweetmint sets off on the mission of a lifetime: to find her brother before it’s too late. With five days until the hemisphere’s big election, Sweetmint must evade and outsmart all who aim to destroy her and her people, braving a world full of hard truths that many would rather remain hidden.

Kind of long but a good story

It was a pretty good story, it started slow but the ending was good and a different twist

Solid Sophomore Novel

Mateo Askaripour follows up his 2020 New York Times best selling novel, Black Buck, with a new book that is sure to be a hit. This Great Hemisphere still has Mateo’s voice in the writing, but in terms of genre, it’s a futuristic journey that I was hooked on. The world-building in this novel is extremely well thought out, to the point that I feel it would make for a good TV series. As for the audiobook, the narrator does an excellent job immersing me into the prose. I would recommend listening to it on 1.2x speed, however, but I’m also admittedly an impatient New Yorker so that’s probably just me.

Thin Metaphor and Poor Use of Central Conceit (Invisibility)

I had to force myself to finish this one. The world-building was shallow, and the central conceit — that half of the world’s population was now invisible — was barely functional as a plot device. The author kept finding new ways to nullify the invisibility (lens implants that can see heat, mandatory painting of the skin, etc.), while at the same time writing as though his characters could see each other with no problem. There was lots of eye contact, and looking each other up and down, and waving hello, and noticing expressions or posture, that should have been impossible. Equally aggravating and unexplained, this post-climate-disaster world has no animals, insects, or seasons, and the main character has never seen a flower. And yet - they live in a forest and their diet consists mainly of gardened herbs, root vegetables, and squash varieties. How do these grow without their pollinators and flowers? Finally, the metaphor for the oppression of minorities in the West was painfully obvious. There was little nuance to either the oppressors or the oppressed; the social construct felt one-dimensional, as though the author (who is a person of color) had once read about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in a history book instead of living his own experience. Skip it.