A review by prcizmadia
The Mirage by Matt Ruff

2.0

I loved this book for the first 3/4ths, but it rapidly descended into something that I could scarcely recognize. It began with truly imaginative world-building and a truly tense and interesting investigation into reality itself. So, having built such a daring world that became an inquiry into what is real... why would he go and throw it all out at the end? Some may argue that he didn't actually do that, but to me, the implication is clear- and the characters may as well have woken up from a bad dream instead of what happened. There was such potential for deeply examining the roles of the US, Arab states, Israel, Europe... but it was thin-to-nonexistent, in my estimation. I was mightily annoyed that he would take a gutsy premise and then speed away from it so completely. If you're going to destroy and remake the world, make it stick.