You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
shahirsaleheen 's review for:
Victim
by Andrew Boryga
Hm. This was an interesting story about how falsified performative activism can be damaging in the conversations about race, class, and its intersection, as well as an interesting story about authenticity. It’s an interesting story about how an individual’s desire for validation and social media addiction can influence their perception of their reality. I like the idea of how a person, a prospective writer, can find themselves in a situation where they keep writing stories in the hopes to advance their careers, and how it connects with the world in which they grew up in, but I think this books falls flat in its character design. (Spoilers ahead)
Javier, Anais, Gio are all written with a pretty linear character progression that doesn’t even build any expectations to subvert. A guy who grows up with a mob boss father who has Machiavellian tendencies. A woman who centers their identity around activism grew up in a more conservative space, and is also not as enthusiastic with helping working class people as they believed. A guy who grows up along side guy character, but acts as a foil that ends up in jail, and comes out of jail just looking to move on in life. It feels like 3 relatively cliche storylines converging in with each other that don’t really build any foundation for major character growth.
The ending didn’t really stick to me. He gets Bojack Horseman’d on an interview, exposed for his fraudulent race baiting and it leads him to working outside of writing, when suddenly he gets an opportunity to write a novel talking about the redemptive arc. The narrator then points to us saying that we “created him”, in the sense that because the readers read through the story they somehow supported the stories and the content of his writing in a way. I think this was trying to be a point of how people, especially on social media, can tend to sensationalize information for their own gain and how the public in this novel supported his writing. I think the point of this part was that he *didn’t* really learn his lesson, I think the last few paragraphs just feel a bit phoned in, and that emphasis doesn’t really work.
Javier, Anais, Gio are all written with a pretty linear character progression that doesn’t even build any expectations to subvert. A guy who grows up with a mob boss father who has Machiavellian tendencies. A woman who centers their identity around activism grew up in a more conservative space, and is also not as enthusiastic with helping working class people as they believed. A guy who grows up along side guy character, but acts as a foil that ends up in jail, and comes out of jail just looking to move on in life. It feels like 3 relatively cliche storylines converging in with each other that don’t really build any foundation for major character growth.
The ending didn’t really stick to me. He gets Bojack Horseman’d on an interview, exposed for his fraudulent race baiting and it leads him to working outside of writing, when suddenly he gets an opportunity to write a novel talking about the redemptive arc. The narrator then points to us saying that we “created him”, in the sense that because the readers read through the story they somehow supported the stories and the content of his writing in a way. I think this was trying to be a point of how people, especially on social media, can tend to sensationalize information for their own gain and how the public in this novel supported his writing. I think the point of this part was that he *didn’t* really learn his lesson, I think the last few paragraphs just feel a bit phoned in, and that emphasis doesn’t really work.