A review by daceydacey
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

2.5

This book takes A LOT from other dystopian novels (1982, Fahrenheit 51, etc), but at book club it was hypothesized that because the author is from Kuwait and has dealt personally with censorship in her country, this was intentional. I also wonder if some of the nuance got lost in translation. For a book about “the global threat to free speech," it’s…boring. I had a lot of questions: about the rabbits (do they represent imagination or collective memory or?), about the significance of Zorba the Greek, and about the ending (which is a little clever while also being a little cliche). I loved the daughter. I didn’t love the MC (he felt underdeveloped) or the librarian (another cliche: "beautiful but trying to hide it” that also was potentially also really cool — the ending).