Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

The Every by Dave Eggers

3 reviews

ghostmomxoxo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Writing this review at 3:30 AM because I fully could not go to bed without finishing this book. I haven’t had such strong feelings about a story in a long time, so strap in, because I have so much to say 🤠

The Circle is one of my favourite books; I love recommending it to people; it’s punchy and witty and terse and has something to say. The Every is… not going to be as recommended by me, but I still think Eggers did some really amazing stuff with this sequel. The worldbuilding is so incredibly evocative and I loved getting to learn and understand more about the world of The Every; I especially think using Delaney “roaming” around the company was a really effective way to flesh out the landscape. I think Eggers does a good job of executing commentary on surveillance capitalism and this idea of a tech-based panopticon which is so terrifying and horrifying that you spend the entire story with almost an… ulcer feeling? It’s really impactful, and I’m going to be thinking about it for ages. Also the bit about “the absolute maximum length a book should be is 577 pages” and then the book actually being 577… MWAH Dave eggers you sly sneaky guy!!

Now for the stuff I struggled with. To say this book is alarmist is the understatement of the century. It felt like Eggers - and by extension Delaney’s narration - was trying to grab me by the shoulders and go “don’t you see how stupid you are??? Every time you let a website accept all cookies you’re spelling the end of humanity???”. It read almost condescending at times, but I also feel like that’s just a hallmark of this tech dystopia genre. My other primary complaint is that the characterization in this book is so weak, it almost feels at odds with the quality of the worldbuilding. It genuinely felt jarring.
When Aggarwal told Delaney she was taking the job with The Every I laughed so hard I almost cried.
The irony of this is that I think it does a great job of emphasizing how easy it is for all these characters with varying moral and ethical compasses to be swallowed whole by The Every, regardless of how strong they are as people - which is something I loved about The Circle. Also if I had to meet one more character wearing a too-tight Lycra pantsuit I was going to explode :)

In the nicest way possible, I will probably never read this book again BUT I will definitely revisit it in my nightmares ❤️❤️❤️
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comrade_mia's review against another edition

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informative reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

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beehives's review against another edition

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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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