Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite

In Dust to Dust by John Hudson, Dr. Patrick Alexander leads BioGen, a private research company in Virginia that discovers a way to restore dead organisms to life through regeneration from skeletal remains. After scientists successfully revive a circus chimpanzee buried since 1926, Alexander gets permission from the descendants of Thomas Jefferson to remove the third president from his grave at Monticello for the first human trial. Jefferson awakens inside a reconstructed version of his nineteenth-century home, believing he has returned to life in modern America, where the White House, Congress, constitutional scholars, journalists, plus investors compete to understand what his existence means for the country. As Jefferson steps back into public life, Alexander faces mounting pressure from government officials, plus BioGen’s financial backers, while the consequences of the experiment begin spreading through every level of American society.

John Hudson writes with the kind of plainspoken confidence that suits a story asking if modern America has the moral stability to confront the return of one of its founding architects. The novel is grounded in human behavior even while BioGen scientists rebuild Thomas Jefferson from his remains. I love that the author includes what a person brought back after hundreds of years might experience on a micro-level, and I chuckled when Jefferson studied a Keurig machine. One of the best angles is placing Jefferson beside the living consequences of his own history. His late apology to a White House steward and the dignity afforded to Sally Hemings during a Monticello dinner conversation are brilliant examples of this. Ultimately, freedom becomes something measured through lived memory and not political language. Intelligently written and immersive, Dust to Dust succeeds because Hudson treats speculative science as a doorway into accountability and unfinished American history. Very highly recommended.