Location:Hamilton, Ontario
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30/60 booksRead 60 books by Dec 31, 2024. You're 2 books ahead of schedule. 🙌
An excellent premise for a book and the writing is generally good. Unfortunately, this book was about 1/3 longer than it needed to be. The second act dragged on and made finishing the book feel like a chore rather than the lovely story experience that the first act had been.
I made it about 15% before listing this as DNF.
The character work seems good, but the consistently high level of “I am very badass” being exhibited by characters was too much for me to take. This combined with an excess of metaphor and simile - many used in ways that, to me, seemed nonsensical - got in the way of appreciating any story or other good work.
Some other reviewers have referred to the writing style as too much “tryhard”. I know this book is exceptionally popular and those who dislike it are a minority, but that's the camp I find myself in.
Fabulous premise and setting, loved the writing style, could not engage with the characters. They feel either flat and uninteresting or contrived for the sake of the story, particularly the narrator. Richard Pepin feels like a character designed to be a narrator rather than an agent present in the story. Maybe this was a nod to Virgil and the Divine Comedy, but if so it wasn't clear enough to land for me.
This book is four stories, each focused on a different scenario taking place in an only-slightly-more-dystopian America than the one we are witnessing in real life. Given that this book was published in 2019 and, therefore, written even earlier, Doctorow shows some remarkable insight into events that would soon come.
An entertaining, thought-provoking, well-written read, even f it does cast uncomfortable light on the predictability of some of our current global troubles.