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A review by heather01602to60660
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
3.0
This was another mixed bag for me. There were things I really enjoyed in reading this novel, things that bothered me greatly, and things in the writing style that were jarring.
I enjoy good dystopian novels, and dread bad ones (you know, where the world is run by evil overlords but no one explains how they got into that point, you just have to buy it and accept it's all bad). I enjoyed how Levin really highlighted that there were both good and bad parts to the "perfect" society of the future, and found the main character's growth over time in how he viewed it helped raise a lot of questions that there weren't easy answer for, and Levin really made very little attempt to create those answers.
The gender issues were a problem for me, and while I understand that one has to consider the time at which a novel was written, I found it disheartening that in imagining a future as a blank slate, the gender relationships were still marred in decidedly out of date mores. I've only scanned a few reviews on the main page of this book and am relieved I wasn't the only person totally jarred by the rape-leading-to-love-for-attacker concept.
As for the writing, I found some of the jumps in time/topic to be abrupt and confusing as I read along. I'm not sure if something was lost in the formatting on the Kindle that might have helped (extra line breaks between paragraphs or whatever) clear it up, but sometimes I'd have to double check to make sure I hadn't accidentally tapped ahead two pages instead of one as the shifts came out of the blue.
I'd recommend this book to someone who likes the genre, because it does get one thinking as good anti-Utopian works will do, but not without some hesitation, esp. for younger readers or those who need a clear message from the author on how they should feel when reading it.
I enjoy good dystopian novels, and dread bad ones (you know, where the world is run by evil overlords but no one explains how they got into that point, you just have to buy it and accept it's all bad). I enjoyed how Levin really highlighted that there were both good and bad parts to the "perfect" society of the future, and found the main character's growth over time in how he viewed it helped raise a lot of questions that there weren't easy answer for, and Levin really made very little attempt to create those answers.
The gender issues were a problem for me, and while I understand that one has to consider the time at which a novel was written, I found it disheartening that in imagining a future as a blank slate, the gender relationships were still marred in decidedly out of date mores. I've only scanned a few reviews on the main page of this book and am relieved I wasn't the only person totally jarred by the rape-leading-to-love-for-attacker concept.
As for the writing, I found some of the jumps in time/topic to be abrupt and confusing as I read along. I'm not sure if something was lost in the formatting on the Kindle that might have helped (extra line breaks between paragraphs or whatever) clear it up, but sometimes I'd have to double check to make sure I hadn't accidentally tapped ahead two pages instead of one as the shifts came out of the blue.
I'd recommend this book to someone who likes the genre, because it does get one thinking as good anti-Utopian works will do, but not without some hesitation, esp. for younger readers or those who need a clear message from the author on how they should feel when reading it.