ARC Review: The Girl in the Zoo by Jennifer Lauer (2023)
An intriguing premise that fails at exploring its ideas in a mature way.
The Girl in the Zoo releases on February 14th, 2023. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. Due to eARC agreements, this review will not have quotes.
The Girl in the Zoo is the debut novel of Jennifer Lauer. The story centers on Mirin, who is held captive in a post-apocalyptic zoo after a robot uprising. Mirin is an exhibit for her robot patrons (known as Borgs) and must entertain them to receive treats, mimicking out human behavior to a leering crowd. Mirin is cared for primarily by a Borg she has nicknamed Borgie, who is obsessed with attempting to breed Mirin. The novel ends up unraveling a mystery around Borgie, Mirin, and the Borg uprisings, while Mirin contends with new guests at the zoo and explores what she wants from life.
I’ll be frank—this was not the book for me. I had just finished reading Caroline M. Yoachim’s The Clockwork Penguin Dreamed of Stars, which focuses on deteriorating AI animals stuck in a zoo after humanity has gone, and the title and the blurb really caught my interest. Other reviews had mentioned complex explorations of motherhood, autonomy, and sentience—so I thought this might be a great fit. There’s a solid premise here with a lot of potential, but The Girl in the Zoo failed to take advantage of it.
Lauer attempts to scratch at these issues, but does so only at surface-level. Mirin’s narration is overwhelmingly childish—until the book explicitly stated her age (twenty-six) and started getting into more adult situations with her, I would have guessed thirteen. Even afterwards, my mind kept coding her as a child, due to the overwhelming lack of maturity in her thoughts. Mirin really shows no sign of being a fully functioning adult. Her thoughts are puerile and rudimentary, and as a reader I frequently had the uncomfortable thought of “well, surely she’s going to address that, it’s right there”, only to be left confused and underwhelmed when it wasn’t. At times I wondered if it was going to be revealed that she had lived in the zoo her entire life, explaining her stunted and jejune disposition. But alas, she was captured at twenty, presumably having a full education beforehand.
For instance, the first question the book poses is “Could some of the Borgs be sentient?”. This is met with breathless astonishment, as Mirin thinks there is simply no way this could be true. But Mirin is being held in a zoo by Borgs. She has to perform for a crowd of Borgs wanting to be entertained. There was a Borg uprising that wiped out humanity! So why is there any confusion over sentience here at all? Is the assumption that you’re being held in a zoo to entertain robots because they’re programmed to do that? By the end, I wasn’t actually convinced that Mirin (or by extension, Lauer) knew what sentience meant at the most basic level. When Mirin finally realized that yes, the Borg are sentient, she was shocked. I was also shocked, albeit for a very different reason.
This childish naïveté is not limited to the science-fiction, but also extends to basic ethical questions. As the blurb states, later in the novel Mirin encounters a “deranged scientist”, but again this is reflective of the shallowness that dominates the book. This particular character is coded as unempathetic to a sociopathic degree, in the stereotypical “science is the only thing that matters” mold. Which can be fine by itself, but the whys behind this are severely lacking at best, and nonsensical at worst. This scientist is deranged because 1) he treated a sentient Borg very badly, 2) facilitated fights between non-sentient Borgs, and 3) now wants to deactivate all the Borgs who are currently imprisoning them and exterminating humanity. It should not need to be said, but these actions do not make someone deranged.
None of these topics are ever really investigated. Treating a sentient creature badly is not a good thing, yes—most science-fiction readers can agree on that. But non-sentient robot fighting is immediately recognized as a grotesque act by Mirin, when there’s not a clear reasoning for that. But these pale in comparison to the last point, which poses the typically-not-very-difficult quandary of “should we disable all the sentient robots who are systematically murdering humans and trying to forcefully impregnate you?”. Mirin waffles back and forth on this question before she realizes in her gut that the scientist is a ‘villain’ and that it’s wrong to ‘treat Borgs as disposable’. I do not recall any conversations around whether the Borgs’ efforts to exterminate humanity should be stopped, or how many lives could be saved, or whether or not being sentient means you shouldn’t face consequences. This is what I mean when I critique this book as childish: it does not seem to recognize the adult side of these situations, let alone address them.
Unfortunately, The Girl in the Zoo plays at being adult science-fiction without fully understanding what that means. I wish Lauer the best in her debut, but this book was not meant for me. However, based on the reviews this clearly did work for others, so if you can look past the issues I had with it, it may be worth a try.
You may still want to read The Girl in the Zoo if:
You want a fast-moving story with first-person narration.
You are fine with books only lightly touching on their themes, and are fine with younger protagonists.
The premise of a girl being held captive in a zoo after a robot uprising appeals to you.