THRUST opens with four characters building a colossal body on an island, welding it together from parts that have been shipped across the sea. Immigrants and misfits all, strangers once, their work knits them together: “Maybe because we were building her body, we felt our own bodies differently, and that welded some of our hearts together.” Gradually we deduce that the colossal body they are building becomes the Statue of Liberty. After work one day, they are startled by a girl coming out of the sea.

Fast forward to 2085, and we meet 12-year-old Laisvé sneaking out of the squat that she shares with her father, Aster, in the Brook. She has a penny to show the old man at a defunct pawn shop. He identifies it as the Flowing Hair cent, and they exclaim over the oxidizing copper. This reminds Laisvé of the “drowning statue.” Only the raised hand of the Statue of Liberty is visible above rising seas. Still, Laisvé loves it, despite the fact that when her family visited it by boat, she “went to water” and the infant brother was lost. She knows that she’s a water girl and a carrier.

"Lidia Yuknavitch apparently subscribes to Aurora’s contention that stories gain strength where they cross each other, that there is no beginning, middle and end. I have never read a book quite like this, but I had no trouble staying intrigued."

Laisvé’s mother, a linguist who was shot and fell in the water as the family left Siberia for America, has a mission for her. It involves carrying objects back and forth through time and doing trades. A turtle named Bertrand is one of her guides through the waters. At one point, she gets a grumpy earful from some worms on a riverbank where she washes up in her travels: “We move the goddamn earth around this entire planet. No credit. Not from humans.”

Another thread in this sprawling novel concerns Frédéric and Aurora, cousins and lovers who we come to know through their letters to each other. Frédéric is designing the statue that France has promised to America, and Aurora (who lost a leg in the Civil War) is harboring and educating unwanted children in Room 8, as well as providing other Rooms where select clients come to enact sexual adventures.

Aurora is a rabble-rouser and ur-feminist who wants to free women from the obligations of breeding and give them back their righteous power: “When I say ‘history,’ I mean showing the children of Room 8 the paths of global commerce and migration and immigration overlaid on the paths and lives of the original inhabitants, the national and local trade routes, the pirating routes, not to mention the laws surrounding individuals and their bodies and movements, the arc of geologic time, and the myths and stories people have created to track and remember themselves.”

Each section ends with a short chapter titled Ethnography, in the voice of a historically marginalized person. They are stand-alone pieces that serve to remind us that what we call our “civilization” is built on the backs of real people whose freedom has been compromised or erased altogether by the powers that be.

Weaving these stories (and more) together, THRUST provides a scaffolding for a book that is part polemic, part alternate history and part science fiction, with two parts eroticism thrown in. It’s anything but linear, switching narratives and times with each chapter. Author Lidia Yuknavitch apparently subscribes to Aurora’s contention that stories gain strength where they cross each other, that there is no beginning, middle and end. I have never read a book quite like this, but I had no trouble staying intrigued.

Take a look at the cover, which depicts a woman with the head of the Flowing Hair penny astride a turtle loosely bound by a rope. Then read it if you dare.