sofipitch 's review for:

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

DID NOT FINISH: 56%

---

I wasn't strong enough, this just isn't a well crafted novel, massive passing issues and some very mid writing. It being advertised at Joan of Arc in space was also a mistake because I feel like this books just massively misunderstands Joan of Arc. Instead of believing that she is divinely chosen Misery is convinced she's actually hallucinating, I'm assuming for a reveal that she isn't and it's just done really poorly. But taking the religiosity out of Joan of Arc is not it.  Whereas Joan of Arc grabbed her life by the reins in some amazing self-righteousness, Misery does some awful things but it always just feels like she is moved by the plot, she is good at everything but always by divine intervention, she seriously does nothing of her own. Also the gender: this world is a world where everyone has a little pronoun nametag and every character is introduced like a twitter bio with their pronouns in parentheses next to their name (instead of just using them in a sentence). And that's about it, there is one scene where a character in this world somehow doesn't understand "she/they" so Misery can look at the camera and give an explanation to a character who doesn't understand despite this seeming extremely normalized in their world. Like very obviously for the audience in a poorly done way, it felt like if someone walked up to me right now and asked what a car is. No amount of space autism you give that character makes that scene believable. But that's it, nothing else about gender (in fact "she" is only ever used in the narrative for Misery despite the character saying she prefers they), despite the fact that dressing in a man's clothes was one of the charges that got Joan of Arc put to fucking death. You'd think the book would have had more to say. It also imitates the style of The Locked Tomb (TLT) and includes memes and internetisms in the writing and dialogue, yet manages something impressive by being unfunny. I enjoyed TLT and often found the memes funny, but here they land dead on arrival. IDK how the author managed that, like I said: impressive. Background characters are also hollow, papercut outs of ppl. It just doesn't have much that actually makes it worth reading, like everything is so hollow and incomplete, maybe if it had gone through more drafts it could be good, but it just kind of fails at everything it tries to do.