Four women embark on a plastic-surgery cruise (yes, on a literal ship), planning varying degrees of physical transformation and hoping to ease the deeper problems with which each struggles. Pilgrims 2.0, Lindsey Harding's debut novel, never quite opines on the thorny issues it unearths, instead laying them bare for readers to come to their own conclusions.
This delightfully unhinged speculative work lays out a myriad of character traumas and cultural issues without ever feeling like a sermon. Lyla, for example, wants the experience of being pregnant, morning sickness and all, even though her infertility means it can't actually result in a baby. Annalie has opted to completely reconstruct her appearance; she wants to escape the reality that her own face is a constant reminder of her deceased twin. Harding lightens the gut-punching depictions of grief with the absurdity of shipboard plastic surgery and the futuristically drastic procedures for which the women sign up. The tension mounts when Larry, one of the all-male crew and an agent of literary chaos, starts down a path that will inevitably result in dire consequences for those involved.
Pilgrims 2.0 navigates these delicate extremes with lavishly tranquil settings and prose that reads like a textual version of an ASMR video, leaving readers with tingles. The crew prepares the ship so that by morning, "the rooms and transitioning spaces would be ready for passengers, sparkling and sanitized, the air saturated with breathable calm." All said, it's a cutting and satirical romp that brings both laughter and moments of real poignancy to the proverbial surgery table. --Carol Caley, writer