Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

The Every by Dave Eggers

2 reviews

augie_'s review against another edition

challenging dark informative tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death, Injury/Injury detail, Cancer, Suicidal thoughts, Animal death, Fire/Fire injury, Murder, and Violence

Minor: Pregnancy

beehives's review against another edition

dark tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Like "The Circle", "The Every" presents a bleak technological future without any concrete solutions to how to avoid it. Eggers has interesting ideas of how far humans could go in replacing society with technology and fleshes out the world he described in "The Circle", but he fails to offer any sort of way to dig ourselves out of this hole. The book is also quite self-referential (it briefly mentions about the 2019 movie "The Circle" based on the book, which Eggers seems unhappy about) and contains more obvious references to existing places and technologies, an interesting contrast with the vagueness of the Circle in the first book.

Delaney is a hard main character to root for; on the one hand, she's noble in her goal of taking down the Every and her backstory is sympathetic, but on the other hand, her methods are incredibly naive. The end of the story seems rather obvious about halfway through, so I found myself hoping against hope that she would realize before it was too late (spoiler:

she didn't. Trust no one.

). Perhaps the only characters I really rooted for were the "trog" communities and the homeless encampment communities, though several "Everyones" deserved sympathy for their treatment within the system.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal death

Moderate: Animal cruelty, Fire/Fire injury, and Suicide

Animal death/cruelty specifics:

The Every begins to crack down on pet ownership, first restricting beaches to chipped dogs - resulting in Hurricane, the main dog character, becoming depressed and suffering a serious injury on his paw - then banning pets altogether. There are descriptions of crowded animal shelters, aforementioned dog depression, and an explicit (though not gory in any way) description of Hurricane's death.

In addition, there are brief conversations about past drug addiction and alcoholism as well as one side character's prolonged mental breakdown.