A review by pnwbibliophile
Blackouts by Justin Torres

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

Dissonance. Each piece of this I should have loved based off my own reading proclivities and identity. Yet I often didn’t enjoy the pieces and they largely failed to meld together for me into something larger than the sum of their parts. I appreciate the attempt at examining queer identity and erasure in this creative way, but it fell flat for me. I feel terrible that I didn’t like this more.

I think my dissonance, my lack of attachment, stems primarily from the writing tone. Even in the more tender moments of dialogue between the main character and the old man, the voice still had this sterile, stripped, clinical feel. I yearned for more emotional bravado tackling such emotional themes. In fact, stylistically this would have been an unapologetically queer act of protest against the clinical way homosexuals were portrayed in the blackout text had the author written in a more emotional or mildly poetic manner. Stripped bare of real emotion, it felt like a queer person giving into what the misguided people in that original text were saying about us. It also felt contrived and overly academic in a manner that felt overbearing at times. The writing tone combined with the contrived structure was off-putting. I do appreciate the ingenuity of undertaking a more unconventional structure.

This is speculative fiction, which is known for bouncing around and often not having anything for the reader to latch onto, but this also lacked any driving action or question to make me want to read on. The question of what the main character was finding out in his research or even the question of who he was or who the old man was was not really enough to draw me in. I also was left grasping as to the answers of those questions and not in a prophetic, “it doesn’t matter” way.

The editorial team also did a poor job with a few elements. The photos and other insertions were far too small such that some were barely legible. I listened to the audiobook and ebook simultaneously and pages were simply not read on the audiobook when they easily could have been. For photos in the audiobook, no reference was made when they occurred or what they entailed. Reference to the insertions was made at the end of both the ebook and audiobook and yet what the audiobook said did not match the ebook, which was hard to follow. Why were these left to the end as well? Context after the fact when I can’t see these insertions without flipping back and forth a thousand times felt both droningly academic and missed their moment to be left at the very end. A page of blackouts was also read differently to what was in the ebook. For receiving the National Book Award, I would have expected these mistakes to have been ironed out with a Big Five publishing team.