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monisousa93's review
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
thesaltiestlibrarian's review
4.0
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. The review herein contains my opinion and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.
This is how literary science fiction is supposed to read.
(Ian McEwan, eat your heart out, you sallow snob.)
Our narrator is not named. Her mother and father have a very abusive relationship. And in the end, they're still a family that learns to bridge the gap between them in the face of a crisis.
After winning a modeling competition (on accident) when she's sixteen, our heroine lives in Paris until she's 24, then retires in her home city of Montreal. She has successfully escaped her traumatic childhood and distanced herself from her parents.
However, the online persona she reinvents on a daily basis--Anouk--contains more traces of herself and her parents than even she realizes until the end.
This book was heartbreaking. Not only does it explore the complicated aspects of family life and the enduring nature of love, it manages to delve into how those relationships manifest themselves in the projections and faces we put on for everyone outside of our inner being. Our heroine's placid, blank face is what made her a sensation. She consumed media at an unbelievable pace and lived vicariously through every character she encountered. But in the end, she was forced to reckon with the love she still had for her parents, even when they didn't understand her need to create portraits in a virtual world.
Her father, though flawed and abusive, did not begin his family in that state of mind. Her mother was once jubilant and ecstatic to be a wife and mother. The years and pressures of miscarriages, a strained marriage, and her husband's alcoholism backed her into a corner where she could only watch the world from a distance. The narrator, on the other hand, chose to watch the world from a distance, to communicate purely through the Internet and never have physical contact, or private messaging, with any of her ardent fans. Only a phone call from her frantic father, begging her to come and be with her mother in the hospital, makes her disengage virtually and reconnect physically.
The lines between the physical and the virtual blur here not because of a lapse in mental grip, but because we put ourselves into what we create, and we project at any given point a persona for people to see online. For people to judge and critique and even scoff at. Our entire lives could be on display with the click of a mouse. Or, a skewed representation of our lives. What's real in this arena? What's a display? What emotions are felt to the core, and which are a filter? And how does all of this color our memories: of people and places and events lived, or not lived?
What role does technology ultimately play in our interactions with others and ourselves?
Watching her mother's body fade under the venomous cancer in her abdomen makes our heroine realize she never truly hated her parents as she thought. On a personal level, I can identify here.
My mother is a peach, and I didn't have the distance issues that our narrator did with her mother. However, her father's bridging of that gap at the last of it--him bringing forward an olive branch and making amends for the past decades of neglect and abuse--I felt that. Or, rather, I felt the deep ache of forgiveness and love tinged with bittersweet regret that things could have been different, and weren't. The heroine realizes her relationship with her father will never be what it could have been, and she forgives him and loves him anyway. I'm in that place myself right now.
Literature is not meant to elevate itself. It is meant to elevate the minds of its readers, not its prose, not its philosophy, not its author (looking at YOU, [b:Machines Like Me|42086795|Machines Like Me|Ian McEwan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552757135l/42086795._SY75_.jpg|65638827], you insipid piece of vapid bilge). Good literature spans "genre" gaps and provokes thought. This book did exactly that. I'm impressed.
You can read more of my reviews on my blog here https://pipesandexpensivefurniture.wordpress.com
This is how literary science fiction is supposed to read.
(Ian McEwan, eat your heart out, you sallow snob.)
Our narrator is not named. Her mother and father have a very abusive relationship. And in the end, they're still a family that learns to bridge the gap between them in the face of a crisis.
After winning a modeling competition (on accident) when she's sixteen, our heroine lives in Paris until she's 24, then retires in her home city of Montreal. She has successfully escaped her traumatic childhood and distanced herself from her parents.
However, the online persona she reinvents on a daily basis--Anouk--contains more traces of herself and her parents than even she realizes until the end.
This book was heartbreaking. Not only does it explore the complicated aspects of family life and the enduring nature of love, it manages to delve into how those relationships manifest themselves in the projections and faces we put on for everyone outside of our inner being. Our heroine's placid, blank face is what made her a sensation. She consumed media at an unbelievable pace and lived vicariously through every character she encountered. But in the end, she was forced to reckon with the love she still had for her parents, even when they didn't understand her need to create portraits in a virtual world.
Her father, though flawed and abusive, did not begin his family in that state of mind. Her mother was once jubilant and ecstatic to be a wife and mother. The years and pressures of miscarriages, a strained marriage, and her husband's alcoholism backed her into a corner where she could only watch the world from a distance. The narrator, on the other hand, chose to watch the world from a distance, to communicate purely through the Internet and never have physical contact, or private messaging, with any of her ardent fans. Only a phone call from her frantic father, begging her to come and be with her mother in the hospital, makes her disengage virtually and reconnect physically.
The lines between the physical and the virtual blur here not because of a lapse in mental grip, but because we put ourselves into what we create, and we project at any given point a persona for people to see online. For people to judge and critique and even scoff at. Our entire lives could be on display with the click of a mouse. Or, a skewed representation of our lives. What's real in this arena? What's a display? What emotions are felt to the core, and which are a filter? And how does all of this color our memories: of people and places and events lived, or not lived?
What role does technology ultimately play in our interactions with others and ourselves?
Watching her mother's body fade under the venomous cancer in her abdomen makes our heroine realize she never truly hated her parents as she thought. On a personal level, I can identify here.
My mother is a peach, and I didn't have the distance issues that our narrator did with her mother. However, her father's bridging of that gap at the last of it--him bringing forward an olive branch and making amends for the past decades of neglect and abuse--I felt that. Or, rather, I felt the deep ache of forgiveness and love tinged with bittersweet regret that things could have been different, and weren't. The heroine realizes her relationship with her father will never be what it could have been, and she forgives him and loves him anyway. I'm in that place myself right now.
Literature is not meant to elevate itself. It is meant to elevate the minds of its readers, not its prose, not its philosophy, not its author (looking at YOU, [b:Machines Like Me|42086795|Machines Like Me|Ian McEwan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552757135l/42086795._SY75_.jpg|65638827], you insipid piece of vapid bilge). Good literature spans "genre" gaps and provokes thought. This book did exactly that. I'm impressed.
You can read more of my reviews on my blog here https://pipesandexpensivefurniture.wordpress.com
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