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tiggum's review against another edition
3.0
I liked the way this book switched perspectives and times between chapters - it makes for a bit of a mystery or puzzle as you read - and the story and characters are pretty good. I don't quite buy the setting as plausible and I think there's a bit of a mix of too much detail on some aspects and not enough on others, but it's mostly a pretty decent read.
mdpenguin's review against another edition
3.0
This is really a little shy of three stars for me. As I was reading this, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't enjoying it more. It has a lot of the traits that I really like in a good David Mitchell novel or collection of stories, for instance, but none of the intertwining stories and perspectives really grabbed me. Part of it may be the poor editing and grammar (seriously, lay off the commas to join sentence fragments and learn how to use a semicolon). I also didn't feel that Gussoff did that good of a job of shifting perspectives. It comes across as the same narrative voice throughout most of it and yet, at least one time, she tells the same events from two different perspectives with two different sets of facts. Mostly, though, I think that it was two things: I just didn't like most of the characters and the post-apocalyptic setting wasn't that interesting or even really necessary to most of these stories.
The structure was basically an intro chapter for a character and then a concluding chapter to explain what happened to them, with a two or three of them only getting one chapter from their perspective with the rest of their stories being told from another character's perspective. It bounces around about a 50 year period of time that starts well before societal collapse but mostly takes place about a decade or so after. Not all of the loose ends were tied up by the end, but I didn't even really care what ultimately happened to Didi or the psychopath, though the psychopath was probably my favorite character because her story was more interesting than the others and she at least had strong emotions -- most of the characters seemed to have fairly flat or even blunted affects. Of course, they had every reason to be depressed and flat, but it doesn't make for interesting reading. The bots and the collapse of society were mostly in the background of the stories and the taboo against people showing their mouths is only partially explained and really borders on absurd. (Seriously, you can't have babies wear face masks: they explore the world by sucking on things.) Ultimately, though, the author failed to make me care about anything in the book at all.
The structure was basically an intro chapter for a character and then a concluding chapter to explain what happened to them, with a two or three of them only getting one chapter from their perspective with the rest of their stories being told from another character's perspective. It bounces around about a 50 year period of time that starts well before societal collapse but mostly takes place about a decade or so after. Not all of the loose ends were tied up by the end, but I didn't even really care what ultimately happened to Didi or the psychopath, though the psychopath was probably my favorite character because her story was more interesting than the others and she at least had strong emotions -- most of the characters seemed to have fairly flat or even blunted affects. Of course, they had every reason to be depressed and flat, but it doesn't make for interesting reading. The bots and the collapse of society were mostly in the background of the stories and the taboo against people showing their mouths is only partially explained and really borders on absurd. (Seriously, you can't have babies wear face masks: they explore the world by sucking on things.) Ultimately, though, the author failed to make me care about anything in the book at all.
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