Shameless Self-Promotion and a Book Review of Any Human Power by Manda Scott
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Book Review: Any Human Power by Manda Scott
“We need a circuit breaker. A fresh start. The contained encounter with death that every whole and healthy culture has ever given its young people so they can find the courage to set down the insecurities of childhood and step with confidence into the commonwealth of adults. Imagine what we could be if we brought the best of our technology together with the best of our humanity inservice to life instead of endlessly destroying it.”
We begin with Lan, our elderly female protagonist, on her deathbed. As she is slipping between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead, she makes a promise to her teenaged grandson, Finn, that she’ll be there for him whenever he needs her, binding her indefinitely to the Land of the Between. During her life, Lan practiced shamanic dreaming, allowing her to travel into the deep time of the world. After death, Lan harnesses newfound powers to communicate with her living relatives and follow divergent timelines pertaining to the fate of her family, which turns out to be the fate of the world itself.
Meanwhile, in the realm of the living, her family is shaking up a political firestorm that threatens their very lives — the firestorm revolving around her 14 year old granddaughter, Kaitlyn, born after Lan’s death. One tweet from Kaitlyn ignites a spark that permeates the world, starting an uprising that the establishment must squash rather than cede power.
Author Manda Scott, host of the Accidental Gods podcast, calls this work a “thrutopian” novel, meaning that it’s neither utopian (impossible) nor dystopian (unnecessary)2. Thrutopian stories act as a“road map that takes us from here to there” — from this current period of conflagration to the beautiful future we all dream of. A practitioner of shamanic dreaming herself, Scott weaves in incredibly vivid imagery of the Afterlife and the Land of Dreams, adding a mythic resonance to the book that was wholly unique.
Any Human Power is a really interesting book that I oscillated between devouring and setting aside. It’s a book that followers of Death in The Garden may enjoy many aspects of while also finding it slightly frustrating from a story perspective. It’s a book that blends political realism and myth-magic, yet the “real” parts are unfortunately the parts that felt the most unrealistic to me.
Overall, my rating is a 3.5/5.
This book has a vast yet contained scope, spawned from a dream and visions, and expresses many ideas that I firmly agree with. As far as a story, however, I think there are flaws that prevent it from being as emotionally engaging as it could have been, and emotional, human richness is why the medium of fiction is so far superior to non-fiction. The first few chapters of the book had me weeping, and truly feeling. I only wished that poignant feeling had lasted through the duration of the book as it became less about characters, relationships, and dream-magic and more about politics.
This book has some beautiful messages, and pieces of imaginative prose that made my heart sing and feel seen. Then there were parts that made me feel very disconnected, and I couldn’t quite relate to the characters. I think followers of this project should absolutely give it a shot, and come to their own conclusions. It is clear that Scott put a tremendous amount of love, care, imagination, and intellect into this book, and she should be supported for such an immense effort.
Get your own copy of Any Human Power today.
Thank you to Kelsey Butts for a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
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She also makes the claim, rightly, that we really don’t need more dystopian stories, and that what we write about is the world that we create. On a podcast, she spoke about the responsibility of artists, writers in particular, for shaping the world — something I wholeheartedly agree with.