Reviews

Black Box by Jennifer Egan, Brendan Monroe

timna_wyckoff's review

5.0

Heard Jennifer Egan speak at the National Book Festival, immediately came home and looked this up on the New Yorker website. Egan is such a talented writer. Yes, this is a novella made of tweets. Yes, it works amazingly.

aquamarinecadet's review

adventurous dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

interesting bio dystopia! and great writing, but overloaded with stereotypes 

olita's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

4.0

studydniowka's review

challenging dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

I didn’t know what was going on.

tete256's review

adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

annadc123's review

4.0

4-4.5/5
Really short but pretty interesting!

emstronker96's review

5.0

A fast-paced, intriguing story that uses an atypical perspective, voice and tense to create a dystopian world where women must become undercover spies as a form of national service and display of their patriotism. It had me hooked.

whatthefawkes's review

4.0

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"Remember that, should you die, you will have triumphed merely by delivering your physical person into our hands."

This was a very unusual read, but that's one of the things I love about the short story format: the experimentation. Egan wrote Black Box as a series of tweets over 9 days, and it suits the tone of the piece. Each sentence amounts to no more than 140 characters and appear to be instructions from some outside government source. Set in the future, the story follows an unidentified American who has volunteered to be a spy, going to the south of France to infiltrate an organisation and obtain some secret information. What she's trying to obtain we don't know. There's a lot left to the imagination but written in the second person, Egan creates the illusion that you're not an outsider looking in, you're the citizen spy in this mission.

"Our counsellors are available around the clock for the first two weeks of your reimmersion and during business hours thereafter."

It's jarring and it's unsettling, and I'd 100% recommend to anyone that's interested in the concept.

hermit_essa's review

5.0

Clever. Could not imagine following it on a twitter feed but very much stands as a story on its own.

jetski's review

dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

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

3.75