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A review by bookph1le
A Better World by Sarah Langan
1.0
1 star because I disliked it, not because I think the book is bad. The tl;dr is that it just didn’t work for me, even though dystopia is often my thing.
I think what made this book impossible for me to like was how weird everything was. To buy into a dystopia, the weirdness needs to be a lot more subtle. That way, I can understand why the characters buy into it. The book did address the way some family members tried to unsee the things the saw in order to grasp at a world that felt safer than the one they’d left, but that didn’t resonate with me because I felt disconnected from the characters and found them delusional. I have a hard time believing most people wouldn’t be creeped out by the level of weirdness festering in PV.
Because of this, I think the messages this book contains about corporate abuse and complicity get muddied. That’s a shame, because they’re interesting ideas.
Lastly, I really disliked the marriage dynamic. The book seemed to want to give it grace, but there was so much wrong with the dynamic that I think the book should maybe have interrogated why people tolerate as much in marriages as they do.
This was a weird and disappointing reading experience for me.
I think what made this book impossible for me to like was how weird everything was. To buy into a dystopia, the weirdness needs to be a lot more subtle. That way, I can understand why the characters buy into it. The book did address the way some family members tried to unsee the things the saw in order to grasp at a world that felt safer than the one they’d left, but that didn’t resonate with me because I felt disconnected from the characters and found them delusional. I have a hard time believing most people wouldn’t be creeped out by the level of weirdness festering in PV.
Because of this, I think the messages this book contains about corporate abuse and complicity get muddied. That’s a shame, because they’re interesting ideas.
Lastly, I really disliked the marriage dynamic. The book seemed to want to give it grace, but there was so much wrong with the dynamic that I think the book should maybe have interrogated why people tolerate as much in marriages as they do.
This was a weird and disappointing reading experience for me.