Tyrants, cowards, heroes

Slice the Water
by PP Wong

Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2025
$26.00 / 9781773104447

Reviewed by Isabella Ranallo

*

PP Wong’s dystopian novel Slice the Water opens on a chilling incident. Soldiers descend on sixteen-year-old Fred’s home village of How Poisson, gather all the citizens’ books, and destroy them in a “metal chomping mouth.” The scene reads as uncomfortably relevant in 2025, with politics of book banning and the historical implications of such censorship being a pressing topic. It begs the question: how much distance is there between our reality and Fred’s? Wong’s vivid scene is a powerful entry point to the story. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much downhill from there.

Slice the Water is a coming-of-age story focused on a nation called Mahana ruled by an oppressive king who destroys books, limits the amount of food each citizen can eat, and punishes peaceful demonstration with imprisonment. The novel journeys from the book seizing to Fred’s father’s quiet rebellions to Fred’s participation in a larger protest, culminating in his experience escaping to an alternate, seemingly idyllic civilization. 

The novel falls into the category of dystopian fiction made famous by The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Feed, and Allegiant, a genre that has been vastly populated for well over the past ten years. The more cynical may call it an overpopulated genre, and while I don’t necessarily agree, there are definite pitfalls to having bookshelves’ worth of competition. I’m of The Hunger Games generation and read a generous amount of YA-oriented fantasy and dystopia—until one day I suddenly became sick of it. I hadn’t read a title in the genre for a while when I picked up Slice the Water, but started reading with an open mind. Because of the many other options, any new offering has to not only be well developed, but offer a new facet to the genre. Slice the Water does neither.

There is a lack of development across all areas of the narrative. While there are whispers of intriguing world-building, as suggested by the opening devastation of the book massacre, they are not expanded upon enough to make them successful. This is true on a structural level as well. The book is made up of very short chapters—one barely a page long. While not a bad thing in itself, this narrative construction lends to a sense of half-realized scenes and rushed plot progression. Finally, the characters and their relationships are not fully realized—perhaps with the exception of Grandma Ha-Tee and the relationship between Fred and his father. 

In contrast, the tyrannical force behind the novel, the King, remains as obscure and two-dimensional as his name. Fred’s love interest is supposed to be Bridge, his childhood friend. Wong announces this to the reader a fair way into the narrative without any material to support the claim both before and after this awkwardly pointed declaration. That’s is a smaller part of Fred serving as a very flat main character. Over 70 pages into the book, when he described a soldier as “a young man, a little older than me,” it made me realize I had no concept of not only Fred’s appearance, but his personality as well. To be honest, I had to double-check that his name was in fact Fred. That was how passive a character he had been up until that point, despite narrating the story in first-person. Combined, this is a weak foundation for success.

Despite Wong’s exposition-style world-building, I never gained a full understanding of Fred’s world. What explanation I could derive was generic dystopia fill-in-the-blanks. At one point, a soldier describes the state of their world as follows: “If we do not have laws, our land will become chaotic. Women and men fighting in the street…rich people cheating the poor. Evil mischief like when we were under the rule of the gunruns. We cannot have that. We don’t want our land to become barbaric like it was with them.” That description could be copy-and-pasted into any number of dystopian novels without notice. It adds nothing to Wong’s narrative and underlines its unrealized individuality.

That being said, there are identifiable moments of the novel’s potential. Vancouver-based Wong demonstrates a capacity for humour in darkness with lines such as, “When you are serious about being a coward it is always good to be as descriptive as possible about why it is so important to go home and sleep.” On the flip side, she efficiently and chillingly summarizes what it means to survive under an oppressive regime with “We were trying to be law-abiding citizens, out of fear, nothing more.” These strong instances of composition nudge the narrative towards noteworthiness, had the other areas previously mentioned been fully developed. 

Another latent strength of Slice the Water is Wong’s ability to provoke physically uncomfortable and painfully relevant scenes. I felt sick when soldiers confiscated Fred’s pet frog and coerced his friend, Bridge, into stripping and dancing for them so they’d return the injured animal. Later in the book, a law is passed that requires everyone between the ages of 12 and 40 to have a child within two years or else their food rations would be halved. That authoritarianism again felt uncomfortably relevant to 2025 politics. It also demonstrates a political awareness on Wong’s part, as well as her refusal to shy away from the uglier side of what this dystopian world would suggest; and the episode demonstrates Wong’s ability to write emotionally powerful scenes.

Slice the Water also has a notable lexicon—and not always a successful one. No depths of dystopia require adolescents to be referred to as “almost-adults.” Liberal amounts of similar italicized words or phrases appear on every page of the book as part of the made-up Mahanian language. This italicized phrasebook manifested in its most annoying form with the use of “faster” as an adverb (example: “Are we going to faster find the place you moved the books to?”). It first confused then irritated me with all 162 usages in the book. Suffice to say, the italics were overabundant at times. I appreciate the effort Wong put into creating an individualistic vocabulary for the world of Mahana, but the rest of the book wasn’t developed enough to make it work. 

This book aside, Wong’s accolades are impressive. She was a finalist for the Women’s Prize in Fiction with her first novel and has been published in major publications such as The Guardian and Vanity Fair. A degree from the London School of Economics and an MFA in TV writing from UBC round out her education. As I read her bio after finishing Slice the Water, I grew increasingly bemused. Maybe seeing all those accomplishments raised my expectations too high. That being said, the premise of her award-nominated debut novel, The Life of a Banana, sounds far more intriguing. I think I have a better chance of enjoying that one, and am not adverse to reading it.

The basic story beats that Wong puts down have great potential, but they’re sadly undeveloped. While multiple intriguing concepts, such as the massive book destruction and ‘illegally’ harbouring refugees with ‘dirty’ blood are introduced, none are followed through fully before another half-baked idea is introduced. The characters are flat, forgettable, and verge on stereotypical dystopia stock figures. An abundance of unrealized plot twists rush after another in quick succession, culminating in an abrupt ending and completely disconnected and unsatisfying epilogue. 

I can think of nothing about Slice the Water that makes it stand out from the hundreds of other dystopia titles. Still, the notably populated nature of the genre suggests that anyone could find a book in its shelves that they would enjoy, and I hope that Slice the Water finds its audience, even if it was not with me.

[Editor’s note: PP Wong will launch Slice the Water in Vancouver at Upstart & Crow: Thursday, September 18, 6:30-8pm. Tickets are $10.]

At age four, Isabella Ranallo stole a sheet of her mother’s office paper to write the first page of a novel about ten kids stranded on a desert island. This led—with some twists and turns, like any good story—to graduating with a Creative Writing and History BA from VIU, where she was awarded the Barry Broadfoot Award for Journalism/Creative Non-Fiction and the Pat Bevan Scholarship for Poetry. Since graduation, Isabella has worked at the Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre as a research assistant; she currently freelances at Granville Island Publishing. Her work has appeared in the BC Federation of Writers’ WordWorks magazine. [Editor’s note: Isabella recently reviewed Thomas Mark McKinnon and Arleen Paré for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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