Trinity Sight

By: Jennifer Givhan

Narrated by: January LaVoy

Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

"Our people are survivors", Calliope's great-grandmother once told her of their Puebloan roots - could Bisabuela's ancient myths be true?

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors, confronting violent inhabitants, in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. The impossible suddenly real, Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied if she wants to survive and deliver her unborn babies into this uncertain new world.

Rooted in indigenous oral-history traditions and contemporary apocalypse fiction, Trinity Sight asks listeners to consider science versus faith and personal identity versus ancestral connection. Lyrically written and utterly original, Trinity Sight brings readers to the precipice of the end-of-times and the hope for redemption.

©2019 Jennifer Givhan (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

It could have been excellent if only...

I rarely say that, but in this case, if only Givhan had had a likable main character (with a different name--hearing "Calliope" a zillion times on audio was annoying), the book could have been great.

So few books are set in New Mexico that if I find one on audio, I'm likely to buy it. This one seemed right up my alley--post apocalyptic, yet based in the culture (ancient and current) of the area.

I would have forgiven some of the flaws if Calliope had been likable (e.g., not using two of the main side characters to their full potential and giving us the half Zuni half Hispanic man who is a physicist but also knows and understands his culture who sweeps in to rescue Calliope despite that fact that she's so obnoxious).

So...Calliope. She's just generally obnoxious and "stupid," despite her PhD. She's kind of awful to everyone who tries to help her, doesn't care about anyone else's situation--just hers, insists people do ridiculous things for no logical reason, constantly denies what is right in front of her face, and so on. It gets old, particularly in light of the lengthy internal dialogue (way too much) where she constantly debates with herself about what's true (only the scientific can be true to her) and what's not true (what's actually going on). It becomes quite boring. For instance, if all the characters agree that X is true (there is now a forest where one did not exist before) but Calliope doesn't agree (despite the fact that she's staring at the forest), do we really need pages and pages and pages about how the forest can't be there or is not there? It's that way with everything. Pages and pages of her arguing, denying, being horrible, accusing people of things, because she doesn't agree with the other characters and refuses to accept the truth.

She gets a little better near the end, but not much. As for the ending...cliffhanger, more or less. I was okay with it because if there's a second book, I'm not going to read it. And that's the problem, I did not care one bit if Calliope found her family or not (which is the driving force of the book) because I didn't care about her--the side characters, yes. Her, no.

As I listened, what kept popping into my head was: Didn't she have a writing group to tell her she needed a likable main character???