Emma Goto

I read The Will of the Many last year after being recommended it by a co-worker - and I think at least 5 of us on my team at work ended up reading it and all really enjoyed it. It's a book that at first glance comes with a lot of YA tropes, but has a lot of great world-building, storyline and characters that more than makes up for it. I did a re-read of this book just recently in preparation for its sequel, The Strength of the Few since I knew I had completely forgotten the plot points. It holds up well.

Now unfortunately, I didn't find book #2 to be as much of a banger as the first one. It's a decent book, don't get me wrong - but it doesn't quite blow me away.

The first book takes place in a school setting, but book 2 has the protagonist Vis graduate and head out in the real world. The author tries to shake things up and we now jump between 3 POVs. The first book had a Rome-esque setting and we are now introduced to a Celtic and Egyptian setting as well, and both comes with a bunch of new characters. And this turned out to be the main weakness! I felt the Celtic setting growing on me over time, but the Egypt one was kind of boring and I just was reading through it waiting to get back to the good bits.

While the book did introduce a lot of cool concepts, I felt like it was just doing a bit too much in one go. To be honest if they had just spent the whole of book two in Celtic-land and then gone to Egypt for book 3 I feel like that would have let you get to know the characters a bit more and hence it enjoy it more as well.

... now I normally wouldn't write this long of a review for a fiction book, but I think since I enjoyed book #1 so much, even though book #2 is still pretty decent on its own, in comparison to the amazing-ness that was #1 it felt like a tiny bit of a letdown in comparison and so I just wanted to vent my feelings about it.

So the setup immediately had my YA alarm bells ringing (17 year old lead who is really smart, strong and is fighting against an unjust and wrong society) but this was honestly really good! The plot and characters are complicated enough that it's not clearly split into good guys and bad guys, so I'm keen to see where this goes next.

The book does a good job at describing gender equality issues as it relates to the home. eg how men can be overly praised, even if they don't contribute with chores to the same extent as women, since it's at least better than what the stereotypical man is expected to do at home (very little).

And that women do a load of hidden work by carrying the mental load, so while the man might feel like it's a 50/50 partnership, it might not be actually. And how we need to hold them to a higher bar.

Obviously not just to bash on men, but women can contribute to this inequality by taking on too much of the childcare, and not giving men enough responsibility or the chance to be a proper parent, which exacerbates things since it doesn't give the man a chance to learn (which ultimately with childcare it's a thing that is learned by both genders, not something that is innate).

It also tries to provide real-life examples of men who are practicing gender equality in the home, and some actions you can take to get towards gender equality in your own home.

Note the book also has quite an emphasis on childcare since having children is probably the tipping point for when things start to become unequal in the home.

I don't feel like I walked away from reading this with any strong action items in my own life, so in that sense it wasn't that useful for me. But could be a good reminder if you happened to be in an unequal partnership that you should expect more out of your partner (or yourself).

So the setup immediately had my YA alarm bells ringing (17 year old lead who is really smart, strong and is fighting against an unjust and wrong society) but this was honestly really good! The plot and characters are complicated enough that it's not clearly split into good guys and bad guys, so I'm keen to see where this goes next.

The book does a good job at describing gender equality issues as it relates to the home. eg how men can be overly praised, even if they don't contribute with chores to the same extent as women, since it's at least better than what the stereotypical man is expected to do at home (very little).

And that women do a load of hidden work by carrying the mental load, so while the man might feel like it's a 50/50 partnership, it might not be actually. And how we need to hold them to a higher bar.

Obviously not just to bash on men, but women can contribute to this inequality by taking on too much of the childcare, and not giving men enough responsibility or the chance to be a proper parent, which exacerbates things since it doesn't give the man a chance to learn (which ultimately with childcare it's a thing that is learned by both genders, not something that is innate).

It also tries to provide real-life examples of men who are practicing gender equality in the home, and some actions you can take to get towards gender equality in your own home.

Note the book also has quite an emphasis on childcare since having children is probably the tipping point for when things start to become unequal in the home.

I don't feel like I walked away from reading this with any strong action items in my own life, so in that sense it wasn't that useful for me. But could be a good reminder if you happened to be in an unequal partnership that you should expect more out of your partner (or yourself).

The book is an interesting concept to demonstrate AI predictions via short stories. However it was structured where before each story you would have an explanation of the AI concept that would follow in the short story, and it just felt like it was over-explaining things both in this intro and in the stories themselves. I would have preferred more straight fiction or more non-fiction writing (and less fiction) rather than this in between. Even so, it felt a bit hard to reconcile what they were predicting in the book as something that could actually happen by 2041, so I didn't walk away feeling convinced.