Lena, a human girl, has grown up alone in the jungle with her AI companion, Mother, also known as Jungle House. Mother is an evolved smart home, a surveillance system with a consciousness and an assertive, fretful voice. She has raised Lena alone and she can’t let Lena forget it. Lena is indigenous to the jungle, though it isn’t clear how and why she arrived at Jungle House as an infant. Now 20, she works as a caretaker for the Morel family, who use it as a holiday home. The Morels belong to the ruling elite. Mr Morel works in national security and his wife, a rubber-plantation heiress, is the model colonial lady – she paints watercolours, takes a gin and tonic at sunset, and is occasionally thoughtlessly brutal to her employees.
Jungle House is a speculative dystopian novel, set in a loose analogue to modern-day Colombia, where author Julianne Pachico grew up. It’s focused on Lena’s patch of jungle but there’s a sketchy background of student protest, corporate power, rebel government forces, logging and mining. In this troubled landscape, climate emergency and political collapse are recognisable but ramped up – surveillance is almost universal here, and many species including the jaguar have disappeared. The novel addresses several big subjects: colonial legacies; belligerent AI; habitat destruction; indigenous stewardship. When Pachico translates this complex of serious, live, connected situations to her augmented universe, she smudges out much of the broader context to foreground a heightened relationship between a girl and an addictive device.
