Review | In City of Orange, YA writer David Yoon’s adult novel, unexplained desolation gives way to incapacitating heartbreak
- The world is a stretch of abandoned concrete drainage in which, improbably, a man survives. He can’t recall why he’s in pain or what he’s lost – only fragments
- Yoon’s oddly structured tale takes a while to make sense – and when eventually it does for the survivor, the heartbreak is enough to incapacitate him
City of Orange by David Yoon, pub. G.P. Putnam’s Sons
The year is 2010. We’re somewhere in California, and life on Earth seems to have ended. The survivor in City of Orange wakes without any past: “And his name? […] He tests the dead batteries of his memory.”
He is lucky enough to find running water and the drive to stay alive. Also lucky enough to forget the cause of his terrible physical pain, and much of what he has lost.
Plus, he has something in his shoe that may or may not be lucky.
In David Yoon’s first-written adult novel, the world is a stretch of abandoned concrete drainage, urban scale. Somehow, in a concrete hollow, it provides cans of food and the most basic defensive weaponry. (Yoon’s first-published adult work was last year’s Version Zero and he’s a bestselling young-adult writer.)
The protagonist knows he had a family, but he can’t remember their names either:
