A review by hannahlukomski
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

2.0

While this book is skillfully written with quality rhetoric and had a captivating moral, "This Perfect Day" was largely unoriginal and had pacifistic characters who were too uniform in personality. Levin's novel was essentially "A Brave New World" meets "The Giver", with minute differences. The protagonist was the only character that was given any development, whereas all the other characters were submissive and undetailed. One of the dominant themes that prevailed was sexism. Not only failing the Bechdel test, women are portrayed as compliant and unassertive. The only prominent female character, Lilac, had minimal participation in any major events, and was given an all too convenient case of Stockholm Syndrome to explain her passive demeanor towards her abductor and later rapist. The demoralizing treatment of women and the overdone dystopian archetype were lost on me in this novel.