A very frustrating book. An excellent premise, but the protagonist is so hopelessly naive and selfish that it was a struggle to make it through her ovA very frustrating book. An excellent premise, but the protagonist is so hopelessly naive and selfish that it was a struggle to make it through her overwritten narration. The ending is hard to believe.
The synopsis gives the impression that the book will be narrated by Marija Popa, which would have been a much more interesting story....more
Brilliant; I devoured it in one day. While Hulu's show has repeatedly jumped the shark and lost my interest the more outlandish it becomes, The TestamBrilliant; I devoured it in one day. While Hulu's show has repeatedly jumped the shark and lost my interest the more outlandish it becomes, The Testaments is an entertaining compromise between the bleak introspection of the original and girl power rebellion that carries echoes of YA dystopia. But there's nothing juvenile about Atwood's Gilead, 15 years on and rotting from the inside.
Optimism makes The Testaments infinitely more satisfying than The Handmaid's Tale. Whereas Offred lived as a spectre, head bowed and mouth shut, the women of The Testaments get things done. Lydia in particular is a delight. Her machinations, executed with worldly expedience, result in a curious many moments of vindication against Gilead's worst offenders.
The Testaments may not be made of enduring classic material, but is sure is captivating reading....more
It took me a long time to figure out what was missing from Killer T.
I spent nearly a week reading it, and all the while I had a nagging feeling in thIt took me a long time to figure out what was missing from Killer T.
I spent nearly a week reading it, and all the while I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind telling me something was off. I didn't know what to make of a novel that only got weirder and crazier with every chapter. There were parts at which I was tempted to DNF, and parts at which I thought this might be a solid 4-star read. What was going on here?
Then yesterday it hit me. After all that searching, my biggest gripe with Killer T is that I don't understand its purpose.
Novels, after all, are written for one purpose or another. Whether that's to entertain, convey a political message, or reveal some truth about the human condition, stories say or do something. And I just can't figure out, even after reading the entire book, what Killer T is trying to say. It flirts with entertainment but never gains momentum as a thriller, incorporates elements of dystopia but lacks the social relevance of a true dystopian work, and reads like contemporary realism but with protagonists too remarkable to apply to most teenagers.
I went into Killer T expecting, maybe foolishly, something like Robert Muchamore's CHERUB series--teenaged spies, MG level reading. Obviously I was wrong. Killer T is a lot darker and arguably more grounded in the real world, even if it's still not exactly a realistic story.
Split into five parts with significant time skips in between, the plot spans a full eight years from the time when Harry is fourteen and Charlie thirteen to their adulthoods. I was expecting a continuous thriller, so the time skips were quite jarring. However, it was interesting to see how the main characters had changed after each jump of two or three years. That I think was quite realistic, and deeply preferable to spending the whole novel with Harry as his insufferable fourteen-year-old self.
In fact, Parts 3 to 5 were head and shoulders above Parts 1 and 2. My near-DNF moments came mostly in Parts 1 and 2, which turned the trashy up to eleven. I understand wanting to write a gritty novel, but personally trashy was the word that flashed in my mind again and again while I was reading the first half of Killer T at the expense of all other adjectives. It didn't matter what their socioeconomic status or level of intelligence, all the characters behaved in ways that made me want to drop the book and wash my hands.
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Call me a prude--I feel uncomfortable when one of the protagonists befriends the other exclusively because she turns him on when he meets her the first time at which point she's thirteen, and turns against her as soon as she sleeps with another guy because, it's implied, she owes HIM a relationship for treating her nice. The other protagonist sleeps with aforementioned guy multiple times despite having met his girlfriend and knowing in no uncertain terms that she's his girlfriend. Neither of them are particularly likeable; I was only able to root for them because the antagonists were so irredeemably awful, you wonder if they're not the secret love children of Hitler and Satan.
Yeah, this was a pretty depressing book. There's no light at the end of the tunnel until Part 4 or 5. A bit late if you ask me. The trashiness became a bit more palatable as soon as I realised that this was a coming-of-age story with elements of sci-fi thriller and not the other way round. It was still not my cup of tea, but at least it was meant to be gross and a learning experience, rather than the glorified author-endorsed actions of hero protagonists?
Harry and Charlie in fact spent the entire novel getting their shit together, and it wasn't until the final two, maybe three parts that they became characters I supported. Before I just felt sorry for Charlie and annoyed by Harry for the most part.
At this point I remember yet another of my misconceptions regarding this book: From the synopsis and cover, I thought there'd be much higher stakes, that the main characters would be at the heart of the Killer T crisis. The truth was, it was only a backdrop for two teenagers learning how to adult. In the end, maybe that's the most faithful description of Killer T. After all, this is not a lighthearted or a fun read. It's an adequate, occasionally insightful coming-of-age drama digging into the grittiest parts of the adolescent experience. Read at your own discretion.
*Thanks to Bonnier Zaffre and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
"The Hunger Games for a new generation," boasts Anarchy's tagline. We're already off to a presumptuous start. If this book is The Hunger Games, then F"The Hunger Games for a new generation," boasts Anarchy's tagline. We're already off to a presumptuous start. If this book is The Hunger Games, then Fifty Shades of Grey is Pride and Prejudice. Instead, Megan DeVos's Anarchy is classic dystopian romance in which the scenarios are contrived, the worldbuilding doesn't hold up and the perils of a post-apocalyptic wasteland can't hold a candle to the true love blooming between its protagonists. And I enjoyed almost every second of it.
I guess this is a guilty pleasure kind of book. If Anarchy was a fanfic, it would be a pretty good fanfic. It follows the conventions of fanfiction pretty damn well, eschewing things that fanfic readers typically can do without such as political realism for juicy angst and sexual tension. So it doesn't surprise me at all that DeVos was originally a self-published writer on Wattpad.
Now, I'm not a literary snob. I live for well-written fanfiction and love juicy angst just as much as the next person. I'm happy for authors to get exposure on any platform, including sites like Wattpad, AO3 and ff.net. But to the Anarchy marketing team, just please don't tell me this has anything to do with The Hunger Games. At best it's a budget Divergent which, if you know my opinion on it, is already a budget version of three or four actually good dystopian novels.
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For starters, Anarchy's worldbuilding has a major believability problem. The novel takes place about 15 years after a vaguely explained war that sent the planet back into the Dark Ages without involving nukes. Cities have been abandoned save for a population of savages called Brutes, and survivors live in camps in the wilderness where their main source of supplies is by raiding other camps and occasionally venturing back into the nearest city.
Anyone with a basic grasp on common sense immediately sees the big question mark. Since the world is now back at pre-Industrial Revolution levels of technology, there's no manufacturing going on. Even if you assume that most of the consumable goods in a metropolis have somehow survived the extensive bombing, they are going to be used up at some point--likely far before fifteen years have passed.
Raiding is an inherently unproductive activity that simply extracts others' resources without creating new resources, yet in DeVos's world raids seem to offer a limitless supply of modern amenities. Out of petrol? Bandages? Ammunition? No problem, we'll just go raid a neighbouring camp that magically has all of these things even though the world ended and no one has manufacturing capabilities! It's honestly ridiculous how people in Anarchy use toothbrushes, tampons and PLASTIC BOTTLES OF WATER. Blackwing reads less like post-apocalyptic anarchy and more like a summer camp for horny students where the shower water occasionally runs out. Oh no, guess the world is really ending now.
But hey, before you start thinking too hard about how none of this remotely makes sense, here's some unfulfilled pining and a bit of we-really-shouldn't-do-this smooching. Let's focus on the real issues, guys.
As clichéd as Hayden and Grace are, don't kill me...I actually liked them. It was a hard pass while rolling my eyes kind of like, but I still had a fun time reading their story. This is one of those stories you can acknowledge are cheesy and contrived to the nth degree while still admitting that yeah, they're entertaining. That's thanks in large part to the romance being quality in a cheesy, feel-good way. I could have done with some kind of warning about the explicit sex though. It's not bad, and it helps that the protagonists are older than the usual YA leads at 21, but the softcore porn was a surprise when this book is, again, marketed after the romance-wise squeaky-clean Hunger Games.
Plot? What plot? I would bet that the Anarchy series wasn't originally written as the several books under one arc but rather one long work the publishers were forced to split into several volumes, because besides its romantic angst Anarchy has no rising action, central conflict or climax whatsoever (no, that kind of climax doesn't count). A few unlinked things just happen, and then the novel ends without resolution. This could be the first few episodes of a CW show now that I think of it.
Anarchy is melodramatic. It's clunky. It takes itself a bit too seriously when its protagonists think thoughts like this:
Sometimes I got so used to this malevolent world we lived in that I forgot what a true tragedy it really was.
And this:
What a cruel twist of fate that the only person to ever make me feel anything was the one person I couldn't have.
I had great fun with it anyway, and as long as you don't expect intellectual stimulation you can too. Megan DeVos writes snappy, readable prose, partly negating Anarchy's frustrating lack of good story. I wouldn't be surprised if she returned in a few years with a legitimately great novel.
*Thanks to Orion Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
If anyone told me I could bring down the president, and the Pure Movement, and that incompetent little shit Morgan LeBron in a week's time, I would
If anyone told me I could bring down the president, and the Pure Movement, and that incompetent little shit Morgan LeBron in a week's time, I wouldn't believe them. But I wouldn't argue. I wouldn't say a thing.
I've become a woman of few words.
I loved this book. I also recognise that it has several dangerous flaws which make it problematic dystopian fiction.
Yeah, I know these conflicting viewpoints make it difficult for me to assign a 4 star rating or in fact any rating, and make it impossible to wrap up my opinion of Vox in a neat little package as my reviewing instincts love to do, but I'm going to back up, start from the beginning and try my best to analyse what's going on here. Christina Dalcher's debut is already generating a firestorm of controversy, and for good reason--but that doesn't mean it's a novel you should avoid.
First of all, as you might imagine from its synopsis, Vox owes a great deal to both the original and Hulu versions of The Handmaid's Tale. There are shades of Atwood's classic everywhere, and you can almost draw parallels between the characters: Jean as June, Patrick as Luke, Lorenzo as Nick. Jean even says, at one point:
In a previous life, or in a future life if I had access to books, I might make a decent editor.
I have no hesitation in calling VoxTHT reimagined for the Trump era. With that description you essentially know what you're getting. That said, I would undersell Vox to categorise it as just another hysterical nightmare scenario capitalising on sensationalist politics. While this is an unrealistic premise that felt so ridiculous I sometimes wondered if it hadn't become a parody of itself, it's also a chilling, intimate drama and a decent thriller.
The thriller component is especially noteworthy because it gives Vox its own sorely needed identity. This book wouldn't be able to survive on introspection alone--we've been there, done that with Margaret Atwood's magnum opus, which is brilliant but also very slow-paced.
Not so for Vox. Just like Dalcher herself, protagonist Jean McClellan is a neurolinguist who knows what she's talking about (or thinking about, because she can't talk these days). Unlike Dalcher, Jean becomes involved in a global plot right out of a sci-fi popcorn movie and has to worry about saving the world in addition to her family. Meshing well with Vox's terrifying dystopian near-future, it makes for a compelling story.
Now I want to address the predominant criticism of Vox: its "inflammatory" ideas and "misconceptions", as articulated cogently by the book's currently most upvoted review on Goodreads. That review rightly points out that Vox, unlike the great dystopian works, is very specific and accusatory with the cause of its totalitarian government. According to Vox, these are simply Christians. Not fundamentalists, not religious extremism combined with an outside crisis like the plummeting fertility of THT, but simply the Christian faith. This may be a slight exaggeration, but if so it's exactly that, slight.
If you're concerned about the gross overgeneralisation that Vox makes with regard to Christianity, read the review linked above. It covers the topic in depth. Personally, I feel that Vox could easily have averted this pitfall by fleshing out the rise of religious fundamentalism that takes place before the story starts, or at least by writing in a few Christian characters who oppose the regime to act as a counterpoint to the many sleazy Christian characters. I'm aware that that may be hard to do in a book with limited word count (being Dalcher's debut) that already accommodates so many plot elements. Still, the lack of effort towards providing nuance unfortunately remains a sore point throughout the entire novel, especially as America's Christian right is now undergoing its own #MeToo movement.
I believe that dystopian books, being inherently political as well as artistic, have the responsibility to address in good faith the real world issues it illuminates. Otherwise, nothing stops them from being merely elaborate sensationalist slam pieces. For me, Vox toes the line of what I can accept. I was able to mentally sideline its inflammatory ideas and sympathise with Jean. I recommend Vox in spite of its shortcomings, with the caveat not to read far into its religious statement.
*Thanks to HQ and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
"Remember, Papa said, whatever happens, the world is beautiful."
Take a terrifying dystopia where climate change has finally caught up with us.
Mass
"Remember, Papa said, whatever happens, the world is beautiful."
Take a terrifying dystopia where climate change has finally caught up with us.
Masses of people fleeing from famine, drought and war near the equator have given a new meaning to the European migrant crisis. Children have never received more special protection--in that, unlike those over the new age of majority of 15, they get nutritious food and a psychologist when they're detained at borders. Prisons have been abolished--because crime is punishable by forcing the criminal to undergo lethal injection earlier than the universally mandated death age of 74. It's in this world that Nicky Singer introduces Mhairi Anne Bain, a 14-year-old who by the second chapter confesses to us that she is twice a murderer.
Writing at a time when the migrant crisis has reached a watershed, Singer illustrates just how many times worse it could get with the climate change reckoning. Certain sequences are dead ringers for the chaos of Europe's migrant camps, from the Calais jungle to the Budapest Keleti station of which we all remember photos. The main difference is that The Survival Game transplants these scenes from continental European cities to the Scottish countryside. The end result is a little heavy-handed, and the message of look at what could happen could not be clearer, but the emotional notes ring true.
Through this nightmare that takes place less than a generation from now, The Survival Game tells an intimate, touching story of simple human kindness in the face of unspeakable cruelty. A mere vision of our darkest future wouldn't be anywhere near as compelling as the journey of one hardened girl and one selectively mute boy bound first by circumstance, then by love. It's a tragedy in and of itself that they're fourteen and six respectively, and have witnessed more horrors than most adults living in developed nations today.
Mhairi is an indefatigable protagonist, resourceful to the point of travelling ten thousand kilometres through a dying world alone. She's nothing as simple as likeable; she's someone I want to give a big hug and keep safe forever. Same goes for the boy, eventually named Mo, who's far too pure for the insane world he grows up in. And for all of the other characters who help Mhairi and Mo along with the tiniest spoonful of compassion, since in this future, offering a blanket is a kindness beyond comprehension. This book understands and fosters empathy so well.
Minor caveat, the surreal writing style and extremely short, snapshot-like chapters (there are 110 in a 384-page novel) take some time to get used to. I promise that it's worth it. I couldn't stand the vague allusions and incomplete information at the start, but it grew on me big time. Eventually, the evasive narration makes for a powerful tool to demonstrate the trauma Mhairi suffered. The story is rather hazy and slow-paced at the start but it really does get much better.
Nicky Singer's prose is highly quotable and filled with insight. Normally, this amount of introspection in a dystopian novel would bother me, but it works in The Survival Game for a couple reasons: First, the book is pretty short and Mhairi's reflections are given time broken up with action. Second, Singer has a unique writing style that gives her narration a conversational tone without a hint of pretentiousness. That genuine voice helps her get away with a lot of YA tropes that would be annoying in another writer's hands. After all, migrant/borders twist aside, The Survival Game reads a lot like many other near future post-apocalyptic dystopias. It's Nicky Singer's knack for empathetic storytelling, first and foremost, that makes this one memorable.
One last thing I appreciate about The Survival Game is that, just as contemporary migrants' stories don't end when they reach the shores of Lesbos or Lampedusa, the story doesn't stop when Mhairi and Mo get to material safety. On one end, they carry a lifetime's worth of emotional scars; on the other end, the locals of their new home carry nativist fear that needs no introduction. The Survival Game handles both issues with tact and realism. I especially admire the ending, which gives a fitting tug at the heartstrings. It's beautiful in its own way.
I recommend this book to anyone with a love of gritty YA or grounded dystopias. You won't be disappointed. I love the story Singer has created, but for the sake of just about everyone, I hope it isn't prescient.
*Thanks to Hachette Children's Group and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
At 700-odd pages, Pandemic is not a light read. Picking up a book of this size is a significant investment of time, not one I make without a significaAt 700-odd pages, Pandemic is not a light read. Picking up a book of this size is a significant investment of time, not one I make without a significant hook. To A.G. Riddle's credit, Pandemic has that hook. With an absolutely riveting opening that promises catastrophe as well as suspense, it begins on a stellar note. Less fortunately, as with many self-published novels, Pandemic eventually misplaces tight plotting and editing and unravels into an overly long, convoluted mess.
The opening act is exciting and contains an appropriate amount of tension, although the reliance on amnesia comes off somewhat a lazy trope. That said, the alternating scenes of Peyton scrambling to cull an unprecedented outbreak in the villages of Kenya and Desmond running from shadowy enemies in the streets of Berlin make for a quality thriller. Riddle captures the essence of both locations with lifelike lucidness that isn't afforded any other setting for the rest of the book. His plot is well-researched and brings in elements from an impressive range of disciplines, even if they aren't manipulated in the most convincing ways.
From there, it goes downhill. Apparently, Riddle's obsession with conspiracy theories is carried over from the Origin Mystery series, and what initially promises to be a grounded sci-fi thriller soon morphs into ludicrous Dan Brown-style speculation involving millennia-old clandestine societies. Honestly, when I think about Pandemic I can't help but be reminded of Digital Fortress, also ostensibly centred on a brilliant female scientist who's actually described as a "swimsuit model" by the author. Blegh.
As if Pandemic's premise isn't already syrup-sticky on the way down, Riddle exacerbates the outlandishness with a number of coincidences that beg suspension of disbelief. In fiction, coincidences that get your characters into trouble are good but coincidences that rescue them from it are unacceptable, and Pandemic has too many of the latter. Far less often do characters solve their own problems than are they bailed out by a lucky twist. Both of these coincidences, however, pale in comparison to the one trope that Riddle can't seem to let go of--coincidences where every single person the bland main character is related to proves to be involved with the apocalyptic conspiracy in one way or another. The first time is clever. The second time is comfortable. The third time, it's become a stale cliché. Next, you're going to be telling me that the guppy she owned in third grade is actually the cure to the plague.
By the end, the constant revelations make you wonder how the supposedly genius main character could have been so ignorant of all the secrets surrounding her. In a way it makes sense, because Peyton really shouldn't be the protagonist of this book. For the supposed lead role, she acts a lot like an accessory. She's developed with a strong character at the start but her personality gradually erodes over the course of the story until she's little more than a glorified weepy MacGuffin. The synopsis should instead indicate Desmond Hughes as the protagonist. The author is clearly much more engaged in his story, considering the compelling background and motivations he displays.
There are various other issues that become evident over the book's length, which would frankly be a monumental task to manage for all but the most skilled writers. Pandemic's second half gets bogged down in tons of unnecessary flashbacks that belong less in a speculative thriller than in a contemporary romance. Dialogue often suffers from lack of clarity as to who is speaking. Conversations go many lines without dialogue tags, which wouldn't be a problem if not for the repeated occurrence of the same character speaking consecutive lines when alternating speakers would be expected.
For all these criticisms, I still finished Pandemic in less than three days. It's that kind of easy read, good entertainment as long as you don't think too hard. To that end I recommend reading in a short span of time the way I did, or else you'll probably start forgetting what happened earlier on. Fans of Dan Brown will likely appreciate this mix of fast-paced action, grandiose plots and short chapters.
"The city would have glimmered, charred onyx overlaid with diamond, if not for the dark gray clouds that trapped all light.
He was a tourist at the
"The city would have glimmered, charred onyx overlaid with diamond, if not for the dark gray clouds that trapped all light.
He was a tourist at the end of the world."
4.5/5 stars
With apocalyptic fiction, it's easy to get caught up in the thrill of survival, of fighting whatever menace is plaguing the planet. There's a certain escapism in killing zombies or running from climate catastrophes. That high-octane brand of adventure serves many novels well. It's more rare we get a novel that just explores the in-between moments and lives within the tragedy without conquering it, but that's what Peng Shepherd has pulled off in her wonderful debut. In The Book of M, no amount of government funding, scientific genius or combat prowess can alleviate the simple human quality turned inevitable apocalypse: Forgetting.
In brief, this is an incredible novel. Weaving enough fast-paced twists to satisfy our escapist urges with insightful considerations of what it means to live in a disintegrating world, The Book of M juggles multiple storylines with different chronologies without ever becoming confusing. It raises just the right number of questions to keep you on your toes but not frustrated--What causes the shadowless to lose their shadows? Is there a cure for shadowlessness? Who is the eponymous M, and what is the book the title refers to? Not all of these questions are answered. Leaving on a hopeful note, Shepherd's satisfyingly open ending provides sufficient closure for ease of mind but still leaves much to the imagination.
The loss of shadows and, subsequently, memory is a quietly brilliant premise that befits the best of speculative fiction. Captivating and imaginative, it suggests at every turn without explicitly asking us what we would do in such a world. An answer is perhaps provided in the form of central characters Orlando Zhang, or Ory, and his wife Max. Ory is an everyman audience surrogate sort of character; his need to be universally sympathetic means that on some level, he has slightly less depth than expected for a lead. Similarly, Max feels stringently defined by her role as the wife Ory loves. Little is revealed about her life before the Forgetting, and the slow loss of her memories would feel more poignant if her personality had received greater development.
However, Naz and the amnesiac, whose true name remains one of the novel's big mysteries, make up for Ory and Max's vague backstories. Both have intriguing stories that benefit from spanning longer timelines that begin before the Forgetting. From the hectic streets of Pune to a Heathrow Airport gripped by terror as the world falls apart, we see the full scope of the apocalypse through their eyes. By combining all four arcs, Shepherd ambitiously shows both the large scale, worldwide catastrophe of the Forgetting and the small scale, intimate human story of a couple whose love is redefined amidst tragedy.
Beyond characters, who are drawn from distinctly diverse backgrounds, The Book of M's world building is sublime. The shadowless's powers to warp reality result in macabre, beautiful creations of the subconscious that too often turn deadly when someone is no longer able to differentiate between fear and reality. What manifests is a world straight out of Inception--a nightmare version of Inception. When a shadowless forgets that the Statue of Liberty isn't an automaton hell-bent on exterminating humans, New York City is decimated. Such is the strange and horrifying future that this book vividly explores, from Boston to New Orleans and everywhere in between.
Yet for all the fantastical elements, The Book of M hits achingly close to home. No fantasy, no science fiction is needed to fuel the fear of forgetting. Alzheimer's may not bring about apocalyptic reality warping, but the terror of witnessing a loved one slowly slip away is no less potent. Ironically, it's when Shepherd addresses the heartbreak of forgetting that her writing feels most lucid--whether it's love, loss or hope, few things are the same when characters don't know what they're missing anymore.
The Book of M is a thought-provoking premise addressed with powerful insights, and will stay with me for quite a while. I wholeheartedly look forward to whatever Peng Shepherd writes next.
*Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
If all the teenagers of r/WritingPrompts got together and wrote a sci-fi opus, Otherworld is probably something along the lines of what they'd come upIf all the teenagers of r/WritingPrompts got together and wrote a sci-fi opus, Otherworld is probably something along the lines of what they'd come up with. It's entirely told from the perspective of an 18-year-old asocial nerd with mad gaming chops and an affinity for dick jokes. The totally casual tone (think Percy Jackson if Percy was an adult instead of a MG hero) makes Otherworld easy to read and alleviates much of the gloom-and-doom subject matter but also causes some of the heavier emotional moments to fall flat.
The blurb is intentionally minimalistic, hinting at a deadly conspiracy disguised as virtual reality but not really explaining what's going on. As a result, the first quarter of the book ends up being rather muddied and confusing because the reader has no idea where it's all headed. Once Simon actually gets into Otherworld, though, the plot goes a lot smoother and stays reasonably paced for most of the way. The story ultimately falls at the intersection of Warcross and The Maze Runner, but written by Redditors. So, a lot more lowbrow humour. I appreciate a good dirty joke when I see one, but in this book the gross-out comedy gets a bit grating at times, considering that it's neither particularly clever nor creative.
World-building is iffy when 75% of the plot takes place in, well, another world. The bulk of it is a road-trip style quest filled with enemies that want to either eat our protagonists or hang, draw and quarter them in front of screaming mobs. Bloody stuff, but again, not that creative--nothing you haven't seen before. Simon wanders through these death traps with a nonchalance that keeps things entertaining--come on, you know he's surrounded by a hundred layers of plot armour, so he can do pretty much anything and still stay miraculously in one piece. Most of the time one giant humanoid monster-slash-god or another is chasing him for dinner and he's just like
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Then there's Kat, his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who's like
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And of course there's Carole, who's a no-nonsense Bible-quoting soccer mom who also happens to be the greatest of all time badass and closest thing we'll come to Lara Croft. (Self-declared, too!)
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The ending is quite meh after the book hypes up Otherworld so much. I expected a fair few questions to be resolved that weren't, being left in the air to be addressed in the sequel, as is the case for a substantial number of YA novels these days. The climax is disappointingly anti-climactic and serves more to set up the next instalment than deliver the payoff of this one, and the cliffhanger in the "epilogue" (which isn't really structured as an epilogue, why call it one?) is more confusing than intriguing.
That said, Otherworld is an enjoyable read short enough that you shouldn't have to force yourself through. Call me cold-blooded, but it's refreshing to read for once a protagonist that does the dirty business without hesitation and kills in self-defence without spending the next five chapters worrying about the consequences to his pristine moral character. After all, it's just a game! Except it isn't, of course, it's way more sinister. We can't let you just get away with running around going stabby-stab-stab at all the NPCs with impunity, can we? That, for those of you wondering, is essentially the crux/message of this book. Not half bad, in my opinion. You could do a lot worse as far as social commentary in your YA novel.
*Thanks to Oneworld Publications and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*
The first word that comes to mind when I think of The New Dark is decent. It's not amazing, it doesn't pull out all the stops and dazzle you, nor doesThe first word that comes to mind when I think of The New Dark is decent. It's not amazing, it doesn't pull out all the stops and dazzle you, nor does it bring an insane new concept to the table. At the same time, it's a comfortably satisfying read, weighed down by tropes as it may be.
Sorrel is a tough, admirable protagonist. She may be immature, impulsive, or rash at times, but no more so than the normal YA lead (or your average teenager, for that matter). Considering what she goes through, I'm frankly impressed that she still keeps her head up and moves forward in her quest to find the people she lost. What the blurb leaves out is that Thomson doesn't just show us Sorrel's perspective, though. We get an equal amount of her boyfriend David's POV, and it's written with every bit the care given to hers. This isn't one of those books where you'll end up skimming one of the POVs because it's so much inferior to the other.
Worldbuilding is where The New Dark falls short. We're thrown into the deep end from the very first chapters, a Mad Max-esque universe with little explanation of how or why things came to be the way they are. Sorrel mentions her grandmother's tales of Before (our present), so did the vaguely alluded to apocalyptic event occur a mere two generations ago? No one knows, or cares to say. To be fair, the lack of clarity isn't that big of an issue, and we do get to see a few more remnants of the old world--Bigshops! Flashlights! Running water!--as the story goes on. It does make you wonder, though: What kind of apocalypse could have wiped out even memories of established society, yet left so many functioning items behind? Somebody rides a scavenged electronic scooter in the book without any problem. If these things are still left behind, how could people not know more of the past? Sorrel and everyone from her hometown of Amat is illiterate--has the written word disappeared in just two generations? Hopefully some of these questions will be answered in the sequels, which I'm quite looking forward to after the cliffhanger ending of the first book.
Another thing about The New Dark, which might be good or bad depending on your personal taste, is that it's significantly darker than I expected. (Well, no duh, you say. Look at the title. Shh.) Mad Max-esque isn't that much of an exaggeration. There's some crazy stuff that goes down in the story, and Thomson's post-apocalyptic anarchy is pretty crapsack as they come. Rule #1 of The New Dark: Half the people out there want to kill you, and the other half want to make you their slave. Rule #2: For the love of God, don't eat/drink/too deeply inhale anything that's been out of your sight for longer than a second. And don't fall asleep on the road.
Ultimately, the plot turns out fairly predictable. Despite the detours and side quests that Sorrel falls into on her road trip of murder and child slavery, the novel ends at a place that many Book Ones in YA trilogies do, barring the cliffhanger of the final few pages. That didn't detract too much from the story, which I thoroughly enjoyed as a shorter than average read with a hefty amount of plot in its 187 pages.
*Thank you to NetGalley and Bastei Entertainment for a review copy of this book! All opinions represented remain my own.*...more
"A man in an orange jumpsuit, lying on the ground beside a luggage transporter; two other workers toppled upon each other; a desolate hangar to the ri"A man in an orange jumpsuit, lying on the ground beside a luggage transporter; two other workers toppled upon each other; a desolate hangar to the right; and the clincher--inside the window of a small airport, a half-dozen would-be passengers or staff. Motionless.
'As near as we can tell,' Eleanor said. 'Everyone out there is dead.'"
4.5/5 stars
Dead on Arrival is not, as I initially expected, Plague Inc.: The Novelisation. It's also not, as I expected a fifth of the way through, a zombie story. It is a high-octane combination of jump scare and Lovecraftian horror, interspersed with a refined if not unique perspective on our world today. In that sense, it's truly a novel of the Information Age.
By no means is this a perfect book. But, in my opinion, it fulfils nearly to a tee the criteria that make for a good thriller. The opening chapters raise a plethora of questions, not the least of which is plainly 'What the hell is going on', and from there on the pace is tight until the end. I was never bored throughout the duration of reading; I often had to cover the last page of a chapter to stop myself from skipping ahead and seeing the inevitable twist. Some of those twists are admittedly cheaper nothing burgers, but in many places they defy expectations in the best of ways.
To explain just how much Dead on Arrival captivated me, it took two of my least favourite plot devices, non-linear timelines and (view spoiler)[amnesia (hide spoiler)], and made me not mind--or even enjoy--them. I've avoided reading books before solely because they contain messy chronology, but this book doesn't use flashbacks as a lazy method of exposition. Rather, the "three years ago" timeline has a life of its own, with characters and mysteries as significant as those in the present day. Indeed, when the elements of the two meet in the last section, it's a hugely rewarding payoff. The ending? Without revealing any spoilers, it was close enough to what I thought would happen but utterly unpredictable on the how, such that it kept me guessing to the end. And with spoilers: (view spoiler)[The Well-Intentioned Extremist may be beaten to death in the genre, but this novel's villain is a surprisingly refreshing take on the trope. Not least, I suspect, because she's a woman with a villainous crush(hide spoiler)].
The concept of technology's dark side has been alive for as long as technology itself, with the most extreme critics declaring innovation across the board to be evil. What I find impressive about Dead on Arrival is that it tackles the problems spawned by technology without attacking technology itself, providing a mostly even-handed overview of its effects on societal polarisation. Yes, it's a popcorn novel and of course you shouldn't read too much into it (as I am now), but I consider the concept well-executed considering how much of the plot is built around it.
I'm going to talk about the characters for a moment here. We've got, first of all, Dr. Lyle Martin, the overall protagonist and main narrator of the present day. Maybe I differ from other readers in that I find him more compelling than the average hero in a thriller. He's a disgraced, disillusioned doctor whose mental issues are always just unsettling enough to leave you wondering at the reliability of his narration. At the same time, it's clear that he's absolutely brilliant. Nowadays, it's all too easy to make the eccentric genius character into, for lack of a better word, an asshole. Lyle Martin may be an asshole sometimes, but unlike most other such characters in popular fiction, he's also strangely sympathetic, even if you sometimes want to face palm at his inability to articulate himself clearly.
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Then there's Jackie Badger, main narrator of the timeline three years ago. She is herself an analytical prodigy, yet firmly relatable as she gradually unearths the secrets of Silicon Valley. There's not much more I can say about her without giving out spoilers, but she is definitely hiding some secrets of her own--it wouldn't be a thriller otherwise, would it? (view spoiler)[I was with her up until almost the end. Even at the meeting when she framed Alex. Goddamnit, Jackie, why. (hide spoiler)]
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Read it. Just read it and find out, and no matter what, don't skip ahead....more
As much as I hate to write it, To Kill the President was a letdown. Maybe it was because of unreasonably high expectations that it wasn't as 2.5 stars
As much as I hate to write it, To Kill the President was a letdown. Maybe it was because of unreasonably high expectations that it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but I was left thinking that this book could have been so much more.
Let me start with the good parts, which--make no mistake--are very good. The author's expertise of the current political climate shines through at every turn, which makes sense given Jonathan Freedland's background in journalism as The Guardian's Washington correspondent. His D.C. is rather too close to House of Cards's nest of vipers for me to feel comfortable reading it, but that's exactly the thing--To Kill the President isn't meant to be a comfortable read. I had to put it down every few chapters and look at something lighter thanks to how disoriented the "fiction" made me. When I got through the last ~100 pages in one sitting yesterday evening, I felt positively sick. An overreaction to fiction, maybe, but this novel hits you a lot harder than a Fahrenheit 451 or even a Handmaid's Tale because of how close it runs to our world. Most of the time I can't even call it a satire, seeing as we're in an age where real life could put The Onion out of business.
The novel's commentary on the times rings true enough to elicit a wince. Case in point:
This repeated response from the President's critics--the wry, world-weary, humorous take--was beginning to grate. Like that woman had said on the radio the other day, We're laughing all the way to a totalitarian state. And if all the meme-makers and cast of Saturday Night Live only knew what she knew, they'd understand that this was no joke. The man was prepared to blow up the planet, for Christ's sake. Go ahead, make a GIF of that.
Freedland's decision not to name said President (he's referred to by his title or a whole range of less complimentary epithets the whole time) means that the above could pass off in an editorial without too much trouble. There are a multitude of other quotes in the same vein, mocking/exposing Trump, Bannon, and the alt-right. And yes, Trump is exactly who To Kill the President is about. It has all the subtlety of a jackhammer drilling away a couple feet from your ear; it could not be laid out more clearly.
At some point, the heavy-handedness becomes a crutch. Take away the references to Twitter and the tax returns and the infamous eeeeeemails (in this case, an unsecured phone line) and the novel becomes, at best, a clichéd thriller derivative of the many that came before it. Minor spoiler: I found the (view spoiler)["victim chapters" where we're introduced to a character and they suffer a contrived death by assassination at the end of the chapter, complete with a "the last thing he saw was..." punchline conforming to every convention of the trope (hide spoiler)] particularly grating. Especially as there were quite a few of them, and they served little apparent purpose until the end.
Speaking of the ending, I wasn't a fan of it at all. Up to literally the 50th chapter out of 52, less than ten pages away from the end of the book, there is no resolution in sight--the mystery has mostly been solved, and Costello confronts the Big Bad...and they just talk. She leaves the meeting seemingly defeated, as if nothing has happened, leaving me wondering if that's it and this is going to be one of those dark endings. But wait! In the last two chapters, the biggest Deus ex Machina of all time materialises, allowing for a halfway proper conclusion. Halfway proper is infinitely better than the non-conclusion that would have arisen without the introduction of this new, contrived plot element, but it still feels seriously weak, as if the author couldn't think of any other way to get out of this mess and just brought in the god out of the machine. That's my biggest complaint about the ending, but there are in general a few things that I don't feel are properly justified: (view spoiler)[The whole deal with Costello seeing highly classified assassination plans on Richard's phone and getting away with it just seemed too convenient. First of all, is Richard so important that McNamara needs him to off those targets? And if he is, how would he not realise that Maggie had spied on those plans along with the rest of his chat records, and take the appropriate measures to make sure that she could never put the pieces together and expose them? (hide spoiler)]
None of those, however, led to the moment when I realised that I was no longer enjoying the book, at least not as much as I wished to. That moment came with the awareness that for all her admirable traits, I didn't find Maggie Costello a compelling lead. For much of the first half of the book, I was looking forward to the Kassian chapters, dreading the Costello ones. Then, when the Kassian chapters ended, it was (view spoiler)[Garcia's (hide spoiler)] chapters that I anticipated. Yes, Costello is a little boring, but by the end of the book what makes her worse than just a vanilla investigator is the *facepalm* feeling that she's messed everything up. And she has, in a way--despite being a competent, highly skilled White House operative, she's soooort of responsible for the world nearly ending. I won't go into details because of spoilers, but if you've read the book, you'd understand what I mean. Characterisation of other characters isn't much stronger, although given that Sean Spicer is very much alive and walking around today, I can't slam them for being unrealistic.
If you're going to read To Kill the President, don't do it expecting much satisfaction from watching an assassination plot against Trump unfold. The result isn't particularly satisfying on any front, because hint: there are no winners. (None that you'd want to root for, anyway.) That much the book has gotten right....more
“When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.”
Phew. I was exhausted after fini“When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.”
Phew. I was exhausted after finishing this book--it really is one of those demanding novels that drains you in the reading. That's not a bad thing at all when a book is written to be thought-provoking, and The Power is nothing if not an exercise in the synthesis of intellectualism with pure storytelling.
I have decidedly mixed opinions on its success at its mission. On one hand, Alderman's speculative vision of a world in which the entire gender dichotomy is upended virtually overnight raises tonnes of insights about our world, allowing her to explore the multitude of ways in which women are treated differently for their gender. She almost gleefully illustrates the absurdity of such ingrained sexism by imagining what it would be like if men were treated that way instead--examples that spring to mind include mothers warning their sons not to go out alone at night and an older female senator unprofessionally ogling a young male reporter. At times, the role reversal becomes heavy-handed, but I can accept a little explicitness on the grounds that The Power aims to send a message.
On the other hand, The Power breaks down as a work of fiction. The plot is not captivating, the characters not compelling, enough to justify its status as a full-length novel rather than a short story, a medium for which it might be better suited. The Power naturally is compared to The Handmaid's Tale, the latter being a major inspiration. The Handmaid's Tale works as a novel because we are made to care about Offred, because Atwood sells her story convincingly and genuinely. The Power rotates through a tad too many POVs to have anywhere near the same effectiveness, some of which are definitely stronger than others. My favourite by far was Roxy, who ironically was the most morally grounded despite being a London gang kingpin's daughter (and later achieving such greatness for herself). (view spoiler)[The scene when Roxy lost her skein is a rare moment of gut-wrenching narrative mastery. (hide spoiler)] If the entire novel focused on her, I reckon it could have been a good deal stronger narratively, as well as hitting on most of the social themes in its current iteration. Roxy is a netizen, after all.
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One thing Alderman did execute better than most novelists I've come across is realism in online interactions. There's a short segment of an Internet forum where the usernames and language were quite on-point, barely distinguishable from what you might find on the more questionable corners of Reddit or 4chan. In that sense, The Power is a truly modern novel, well aware of the times. The lingo might date in a few more years, but such is the price of accuracy to the current date.
Read this book. It's far from perfect. It raises many more questions than it answers, and if you're a sucker for a Happily Ever After like I am, you won't enjoy the (rather inconclusive) conclusion very much. But read it anyways. Read it in spite of its flaws; relish its flaws for reflections of the society in which we live. In that I do think The Power has achieved its goal....more
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