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A review by katykelly
Future Perfect by Felicia Yap
4.0
Multi-narrator, tech-heavy plot. Surprises and a slightly scary future world.
A bomb on a catwalk, a murder enquiry. Multiple narrators each with a story heading towards the main plot... if we can work out how they thread together.
This ended up being much smarter than I gave it credit for at the start. And also featured a fantastically realistic futuristic (and yet so close to today's) society that felt a little creepy and yet so easy to envisage: phones that predict how likely you are to eat chocolate today, where you want to go and to plan your route, even how likely you are to die today...
A police commissioner, his fiance (software expert) tasked with finding likely suspects to the murder, models and designers... the story takes its time with backstories and histories, building up a world of characters within this society and what it's made of people... before satisfying quite nicely with threads drawn together.
Yap gives clues but also dead ends, draws you in various ways and gives plenty of things to think about. It's smart, it's a society as it may be, and it was certainly very entertaining and dark.
I might have occasionally got lost with narrators on the Audible version, it isn't always clear who is carrying the story or who they are until ends of chapters. I might have found this easier to manage with a paper copy, but I did keep up I think. It's less straightforward than some are to manage as a 'listen', though most of the time that was fine. The voices themselves are clear and convey a picture of who you are listening to, though I might recommend a paper/e-copy more highly for those who find multiple narrators a little harder to follow.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.
A bomb on a catwalk, a murder enquiry. Multiple narrators each with a story heading towards the main plot... if we can work out how they thread together.
This ended up being much smarter than I gave it credit for at the start. And also featured a fantastically realistic futuristic (and yet so close to today's) society that felt a little creepy and yet so easy to envisage: phones that predict how likely you are to eat chocolate today, where you want to go and to plan your route, even how likely you are to die today...
A police commissioner, his fiance (software expert) tasked with finding likely suspects to the murder, models and designers... the story takes its time with backstories and histories, building up a world of characters within this society and what it's made of people... before satisfying quite nicely with threads drawn together.
Yap gives clues but also dead ends, draws you in various ways and gives plenty of things to think about. It's smart, it's a society as it may be, and it was certainly very entertaining and dark.
I might have occasionally got lost with narrators on the Audible version, it isn't always clear who is carrying the story or who they are until ends of chapters. I might have found this easier to manage with a paper copy, but I did keep up I think. It's less straightforward than some are to manage as a 'listen', though most of the time that was fine. The voices themselves are clear and convey a picture of who you are listening to, though I might recommend a paper/e-copy more highly for those who find multiple narrators a little harder to follow.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.