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lgreensh's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
almond's review against another edition
5.0
I almost didn't pick this one up because it sounded like it might be a bit too conceptual for me, but I'm glad I gave it a try. I have never engaged that intensely with the culture, so I didn't catch many of the references, but it didn't matter. My partner heard parts of it and said it sounded almost like a poem, and it did. Some of it reminded me of song lyrics that don't necessarily make sense in and of themselves, but somehow convey meaning anyway. It did an excellent job of conveying the feeling of scrolling through social media, and Kristen Sieh pulled off the challenging narration like a champ!
I did not expect thedead baby at all, and it felt jarring, this huge, heavy dose of reality in the midst of all this mindless nonsense. But I think that was the point. At the end of the day, none of the online crap we get all worked up about matters. Yes, it was heavy, but it was beautiful and moving and somehow even uplifting in the sadness.
I did not expect the
nebulous_tide's review against another edition
I might come back to write a longer review at some point, when I’ve digested it and had time to form a rose-tint on my thoughts.
But my first impression is slightly miffed confusion.
Perhaps I needed to be there.
But my first impression is slightly miffed confusion.
Perhaps I needed to be there.
alpheus's review
2.0
I wasn't sure about it for the first hundred pages but the last hundred were touching.
theredqueenlinnea's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
snaillydia's review against another edition
4.0
The moon fell into her window and woke her. Every morning at four a.m., a prehistoric sense of duty, danger, and approaching wolves told her to get up and check the fire. She did, and the fire of the world still burned in its circle of stones.
This novel is about a woman obsessed with the internet as real-life tragedy pulls her out of her online stupor.
At least that’s how it was sold to me online. I was surprised that the tragedy here went hand-in-hand with tenderness and joy. The second half of this book was a mixed bag of emotions that really worked for me. I smiled and I teared up, sometimes at the same time.
As powerful as some moments were, there were other moments where I felt out of the loop. Some paragraphs were incomprehensible to me, and the fragmented style made for a reading experience in stops and starts, the opposite of smooth. I also thought some of the language was overly complex and pretentious. The way Lockwood wrote about the internet sometimes worked for me, but other times just didn’t.
I enjoyed this a lot overall.
rae_swabey's review
5.0
I devoured most of this book in a day. It hooked me like a newsfeed and seemed to replicate the same processes in my brain, even as it satirised them.
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
It is a book of two halves, the first being a prose-poetry tumble of images, memes, snippets of news stories, in-jokes and interjections of real life that speaks incredibly eloquently about how it feels to live a life dominated by social media. As someone who’s fallen in and out of love with Twitter more than once, insightful, hilarious, and frightening, because yes, that is how my brain feels after a far-longer-than-I-intended scroll.
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
In the second half of the book, real life bursts in and the way the narrator had been making sense of the world - through a hive mind of shared language, references and tone-policed detachment - no longer cuts it. Gradually, the tone shifts, until we end up in a place where real emotional depths are expressable.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
This novel does more to articulate what it means to live in this strange liminal half-online space, its appeal, its culture, its limitations, than anything else I’ve read. The tone and structure - staccato passages, mixed metaphors, deadpan punchlines - perfectly convey the sense-from-chaos/chaos-from-sense feeling of an absent-minded scroll.
When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.
The references are so achingly of-the-moment at the time of writing that they’re already dated - it’s a startlingly accurate snapshot. It talks about this phenomenon, so familiar to us now that it’s like wallpaper yet still culturally relatively unexamined, and it does so in its own language, with wit, affection and bubbling unease.
A groundbreaking book.
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
It is a book of two halves, the first being a prose-poetry tumble of images, memes, snippets of news stories, in-jokes and interjections of real life that speaks incredibly eloquently about how it feels to live a life dominated by social media. As someone who’s fallen in and out of love with Twitter more than once, insightful, hilarious, and frightening, because yes, that is how my brain feels after a far-longer-than-I-intended scroll.
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
In the second half of the book, real life bursts in and the way the narrator had been making sense of the world - through a hive mind of shared language, references and tone-policed detachment - no longer cuts it. Gradually, the tone shifts, until we end up in a place where real emotional depths are expressable.
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
This novel does more to articulate what it means to live in this strange liminal half-online space, its appeal, its culture, its limitations, than anything else I’ve read. The tone and structure - staccato passages, mixed metaphors, deadpan punchlines - perfectly convey the sense-from-chaos/chaos-from-sense feeling of an absent-minded scroll.
When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.
The references are so achingly of-the-moment at the time of writing that they’re already dated - it’s a startlingly accurate snapshot. It talks about this phenomenon, so familiar to us now that it’s like wallpaper yet still culturally relatively unexamined, and it does so in its own language, with wit, affection and bubbling unease.
A groundbreaking book.
annivalo's review against another edition
3.0
- tuntuu hankalalta sanoittaa tätä. vivahteikas, nopeatempoinen, hämmentävä, vahvasti kiinni tässä ajassa. hauska ja surullinen!
- internet, vanhemmuus, perhe, tragedia…. asiasanojenkin nostaminen vaikeaa, ei spoilereita tänne heh
- internet, vanhemmuus, perhe, tragedia…. asiasanojenkin nostaminen vaikeaa, ei spoilereita tänne heh