Sandwich Joe
It took me a few days to figure out what to say about this book. For good or ill, it did make an impression.
I’m not sure what I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said already. Like many other readers, I feel that Yesteryear suffers from a lack of good editing. The premise is solid and intriguing, but the execution of the idea falls flat. For example, I’m disappointed at the lack of Burke’s deep research into Christianity, or Natalie’s underdeveloped character.
That said, I did fly through the book, and, despite its faults, I can see why it might be the book of the summer.
It took me a few days to figure out what to say about this book. For good or ill, it did make an impression.
I’m not sure what I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said already. Like many other readers, I feel that Yesteryear suffers from a lack of good editing. The premise is solid and intriguing, but the execution of the idea falls flat. For example, I’m disappointed at the lack of Burke’s deep research into Christianity, or Natalie’s underdeveloped character.
That said, I did fly through the book, and, despite its faults, I can see why it might be the book of the summer.
Authority is a deliberately disorienting follow-up to Annihilation, and whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on what kind of reader you are. Where Annihilation dropped you into Area X’s visceral, ecological dread, Authority keeps you at arm’s length, trapped inside a dysfunctional government agency with a protagonist whose job is to make sense of things that refuse to be made sense of.
It’s a slower, more bureaucratic kind of horror, and it’s genuinely effective, but the book can be disjointed in ways that occasionally tip from “productively disorienting” into just plain hard to track. Characters and plot points slip in and out of focus in ways that feel partly intentional and partly like casualties of VanderMeer’s commitment to atmosphere over clarity.
Authority is a deliberately disorienting follow-up to Annihilation, and whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on what kind of reader you are. Where Annihilation dropped you into Area X’s visceral, ecological dread, Authority keeps you at arm’s length, trapped inside a dysfunctional government agency with a protagonist whose job is to make sense of things that refuse to be made sense of.
It’s a slower, more bureaucratic kind of horror, and it’s genuinely effective, but the book can be disjointed in ways that occasionally tip from “productively disorienting” into just plain hard to track. Characters and plot points slip in and out of focus in ways that feel partly intentional and partly like casualties of VanderMeer’s commitment to atmosphere over clarity.
