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In the middle of reading the immense Game of Thrones serie I decided to take a break and read something else and my eyes fell on Zoo City by Lauren Beukes that I bought as part of a Humble Bundle a while ago. It turned out to be a nice break from high fantasy. In Zoo City lives people that somehow did something wrong and as a result ended up being attached to an animal. The main character Zinzi carries around a sloth.

The stories nemesis is attached to a huge alligator and so on. Having an animal is seen as a stigma by other persons in society so they tend to live in their own areas. Zinzi gets a lot of help from her sloth. Whenever she is embarking in dubious directions the sloth tries to stop her. With the animals (I think) also comes a magical skill. Zinzi can feel persons missed things so she makes a living out of helping people find stuff that they have lost. The main story evolves around finding a missing person and all kinds of intricate turns of events that such a weird setting can offer. Enough said about that - read it to find out what happens….

An interesting side plot is Zinzis other work. Being in debt to some criminal element she works it off by reading and answering scam email replies. She also impersonate persons that is described in the scam to get more money out of scam victims. Normally this line of work is seen as something done by the scum of the earth. But Zinzi is the hero in this story so this makes the scam work feel like a normal work. Brillantly done.

The excellent sloth picture is by Carol Schaffer.