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lizshayne 's review for:
Before Mars
by Emma Newman
This series keeps getting better with every book. Newman is a great author and I love her voice work on all her books, but this one was particularly excellent. It was hard to put down and that's WAY more annoying in an audiobook.
A few thoughts:
I really appreciate the way that Newman writes characters with mental illness. Every protagonist in this series has been struggling with mental illness of some kind and, while it's always part of the plot, it's not convenient and it's not merely to make the story go. It shows them as real people. And Newman is unsparing in her depiction of how people are mistreated, shamed, and shunned for mental illness. This is either incredibly painful to read and be reminded of or incredibly gratifying to read and feel seen. The way she handles postpartum depression in this book is excellent.
I also appreciate how terrifyingly real the world she presents is. The govcorps, the lack of privacy, the runaway economics...she's doing a scarily good job of extrapolating the future and also reflecting on the ways in which the people living within that future just, you know, shrug at the atrocities.
It's also a really good psychological thriller.
I'm so glad I've finished it and now I can actually read more about the next book, which I've been avoiding looking at anything having to do with it lest it spoil this one.
A few thoughts:
I really appreciate the way that Newman writes characters with mental illness. Every protagonist in this series has been struggling with mental illness of some kind and, while it's always part of the plot, it's not convenient and it's not merely to make the story go. It shows them as real people. And Newman is unsparing in her depiction of how people are mistreated, shamed, and shunned for mental illness. This is either incredibly painful to read and be reminded of or incredibly gratifying to read and feel seen. The way she handles postpartum depression in this book is excellent.
I also appreciate how terrifyingly real the world she presents is. The govcorps, the lack of privacy, the runaway economics...she's doing a scarily good job of extrapolating the future and also reflecting on the ways in which the people living within that future just, you know, shrug at the atrocities.
It's also a really good psychological thriller.
I'm so glad I've finished it and now I can actually read more about the next book, which I've been avoiding looking at anything having to do with it lest it spoil this one.