I Cheerfully Refuse

Homebound by Portia Elan is a 304 page novel being published by Scribner on May 5, 2026.

Genre

Science Fiction, Cli-Fi

Blurb

Five interlocking lives. One beloved story. A dazzling adventure across centuries and continents in search of the things that hold us together.

It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She’s nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete—one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.

Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection—and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space.

A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity’s future and capacity for love.

Opening Line

I love the way a computer program doesn’t just describe something; it is the thing.

My Thoughts

A young woman grieving the death of her uncle in the 1980s takes up the mantle of completing the video game he left unfinished. 600 years in the future, their joint creation is still impacting lives.

This book felt like a cross between Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin with I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (and maybe just a tad of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovzky). It’s got video game development, androids, and a bleak future on Earth after climate crises. I appreciated the themes of loneliness versus connection and the power of stories. But I felt similarly about this book as I did those others: there were things I quite liked about all of them, but taken as a whole just weren’t a home run for this reader. I’m not sure if it’s because I failed to feel much of a connection with the characters, or if it was the format that didn’t work for me (two timelines, a gameplay log, and emails). But I do think there will be readers who it’s a perfect fit for, and I think especially anyone who enjoyed the other books mentioned above should consider picking this one up.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger is a 336 hardcover standalone novel published April 2, 2024 by Grove Press.

Genres: Dystopian, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Opening Line:

Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind.

The Synopsis: Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.

My Thoughts:

This meditative dystopian story is brimming with gorgeous prose (and also a fair number of instances of turns of phrase I did not understand, prompting me to wonder if the author was not American–but it turns out that is not the case). In a bleak near future with collapsed infrastructure, a U.S. headed by a proudly illiterate president, and more and more people choosing to shuffle off this mortal coil in search of something better, Rainy and Lark have managed to make a happy life for themselves. When they let a young man board in their home, trouble follows right behind him. Rainy finds himself on the lam in a sailboat on a capricious Lake Superior. As he grieves for the life and love lost to him and attempts to evade those who would do him harm, he encounters numerous strange characters, along with a girl who needs him (and vice versa) more than either would like to admit.

It’s taken me all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

But beyond the beautiful writing and the likable main character who was easy to root for, my overall feeling while reading this book was one of melancholy. So even though I appreciated the author’s skill with words (the main villain is described as a “relentless hellhound and necrotic Adonis”!), how glad am I that I set sail with Rainy on his journey? I’m still not sure myself. 3.75 stars

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