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A review by alexisrt
Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman
3.0
I'm trying to decide what I thought of this. I didn't much like Kleeman's first novel, which honestly made me hate MFAs and PhDs for a few months, but reviews of this sounded promising so I decided to try it.
There's some real similarities of theme between this and You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine: instead of Kandy Kakes, here we have WAT-R, the water replacement product. In a serious SF novel, this premise wouldn't workâbut Kleeman is trying something else here. The fact that water is so basic it should not be manufacturable or replaceable is the point. There's a bit of mystery in the plot, but the answer is so obvious once you're 100 pages or so in that it's clear it's not really the point. It's only a mystery for the characters in the story, not for the reader. Kleeman has a lot of skill as a writer, especially in her descriptions, and in some ways this is what really makes it work.
Ultimately it's a novel about ideas rather than plot or character. I did wish she'd done something a little different this time, though I found it far more tolerable.
There's some real similarities of theme between this and You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine: instead of Kandy Kakes, here we have WAT-R, the water replacement product. In a serious SF novel, this premise wouldn't workâbut Kleeman is trying something else here. The fact that water is so basic it should not be manufacturable or replaceable is the point. There's a bit of mystery in the plot, but the answer is so obvious once you're 100 pages or so in that it's clear it's not really the point. It's only a mystery for the characters in the story, not for the reader. Kleeman has a lot of skill as a writer, especially in her descriptions, and in some ways this is what really makes it work.
Ultimately it's a novel about ideas rather than plot or character. I did wish she'd done something a little different this time, though I found it far more tolerable.