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A review by laerugo
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong
1.0
i'm not sure where to begin with this. i certainly wanted to like it more than i did - i came in prepared to love it, high off of "what the hell did i just read," which i thoroughly enjoyed. i started out believing this is an interesting idea about technology gone wrong. but then, slowly, my temple started throbbing, and then my face started melting around halfway through, and then the protagonist did nothing but scream and faint and be held hostage for 200 pages, occasionally delivering shitty clap-backs that only succeeded in giving me second-hand embarrassment, and around then was when i started allowing myself to ask the question i try never to ask: how the f*** did this get published???
i thought this would be a book about social media, classism, or the dark future of technology. instead it was a book about... shit blowing up? mindless violence against women? nothing is learned, nobody grows. (in case i need to say it, which apparently i do, no white man should ever write a story that includes women lecturing men about sexism. or people of color lecturing white people about racism. every instance of these came off so awkward, ham-fisted, and embarrassing that they felt more racist than the actual racism.)
because yeah, of course there's misogyny and racism, but there are a lot of other terrible things i could mention in this review. i could talk about poorly this thing is edited; there are several typos that someone should have caught in here. i could talk about how none of the characters had realistic or consistent personalities, including the main character, who is so aggressively annoying that i had to double-check with my friends to ask if any of us ever acted like that as 20 year olds and discover, no, it wasn't just me, zooey ashe is just not a likable, intelligent, or mature person, leading me to the suspicion that this is just what happens when middle-aged men are allowed to write about young women with no supervision for 400 pages, and when nobody on the publishing staff stops to say "uh, real people don't actually talk like this." i could talk about how the only thing consistent about zoey is that she is consistently the stupidest person in the room, a fact that she always fails to appreciate, as she quickly and eagerly she takes up bossing everyone around, because that's a charming feature that we want in our female protagonist, ladies, am i right? i could talk about how the world-building falls apart after thinking about it for three seconds (at that point, i had to just accept this book as a loss, because to be fair, i've accepted way shittier fictional worlds, but none of them actually made me question the sobriety of the author like this one did). i could talk about how most if not all of the POC are stereotypes; the chinese bodyguard is literally a ninja (wrong race) and at one point, explains the meaning of a kintsuji get-well gift (again, wrong race), which reads like it was taken straight from that barely-researched tumblr post that went viral on kintsuji pottery a few years ago. i could talk about how of the three female characters, all of the other women (aside from zoey, of course) are whores (her mom) or sluts she hates for no reason at all, a point zoey makes certain to hammer home several times, because of course women don't get along in this universe. i could mention how half of this book is just watching characters - older men, usually white, even the good guys - lecture to a young woman about the real meaning of life and the universe and humanity, about how the strong eat the weak, blah blah blah. i could talk about how the main character is a victim of sexual abuse that is brought up maybe twice times for shock and angst value, but gives no depth to and has no association with her actual actions or thought patterns or personality, and we're forced to watch male villains further torture, threaten, and abuse a woman as a form of torture porn for people who i guess didn't get enough of that in game of thrones.
i could talk about each of those for a long while, but i've already wasted enough braincells actually digesting it in real-time.
if i have learned anything from reading this, it is that i must accept that i am not a part of the target audience for david wong books. apparently that demographic will always be white men under 40 who still find fart jokes funny. the sad thing is that despite all the intelligence and black humor and creepy, unsettling philosophy that I love in the john & dave series, there was absolutely none of that author to be found here. whatever excitement i once had at finding out david wong has a series with a lead female character in a cyberpunk scifi series, is now down the toilet. as would be this book, if i owned a copy. but fortunately i just borrowed this ebook from the library, so at least by deleting it i can get my gigabyte space back.
i thought this would be a book about social media, classism, or the dark future of technology. instead it was a book about... shit blowing up? mindless violence against women? nothing is learned, nobody grows. (in case i need to say it, which apparently i do, no white man should ever write a story that includes women lecturing men about sexism. or people of color lecturing white people about racism. every instance of these came off so awkward, ham-fisted, and embarrassing that they felt more racist than the actual racism.)
because yeah, of course there's misogyny and racism, but there are a lot of other terrible things i could mention in this review. i could talk about poorly this thing is edited; there are several typos that someone should have caught in here. i could talk about how none of the characters had realistic or consistent personalities, including the main character, who is so aggressively annoying that i had to double-check with my friends to ask if any of us ever acted like that as 20 year olds and discover, no, it wasn't just me, zooey ashe is just not a likable, intelligent, or mature person, leading me to the suspicion that this is just what happens when middle-aged men are allowed to write about young women with no supervision for 400 pages, and when nobody on the publishing staff stops to say "uh, real people don't actually talk like this." i could talk about how the only thing consistent about zoey is that she is consistently the stupidest person in the room, a fact that she always fails to appreciate, as she quickly and eagerly she takes up bossing everyone around, because that's a charming feature that we want in our female protagonist, ladies, am i right? i could talk about how the world-building falls apart after thinking about it for three seconds (at that point, i had to just accept this book as a loss, because to be fair, i've accepted way shittier fictional worlds, but none of them actually made me question the sobriety of the author like this one did). i could talk about how most if not all of the POC are stereotypes; the chinese bodyguard is literally a ninja (wrong race) and at one point, explains the meaning of a kintsuji get-well gift (again, wrong race), which reads like it was taken straight from that barely-researched tumblr post that went viral on kintsuji pottery a few years ago. i could talk about how of the three female characters, all of the other women (aside from zoey, of course) are whores (her mom) or sluts she hates for no reason at all, a point zoey makes certain to hammer home several times, because of course women don't get along in this universe. i could mention how half of this book is just watching characters - older men, usually white, even the good guys - lecture to a young woman about the real meaning of life and the universe and humanity, about how the strong eat the weak, blah blah blah. i could talk about how the main character is a victim of sexual abuse that is brought up maybe twice times for shock and angst value, but gives no depth to and has no association with her actual actions or thought patterns or personality, and we're forced to watch male villains further torture, threaten, and abuse a woman as a form of torture porn for people who i guess didn't get enough of that in game of thrones.
i could talk about each of those for a long while, but i've already wasted enough braincells actually digesting it in real-time.
if i have learned anything from reading this, it is that i must accept that i am not a part of the target audience for david wong books. apparently that demographic will always be white men under 40 who still find fart jokes funny. the sad thing is that despite all the intelligence and black humor and creepy, unsettling philosophy that I love in the john & dave series, there was absolutely none of that author to be found here. whatever excitement i once had at finding out david wong has a series with a lead female character in a cyberpunk scifi series, is now down the toilet. as would be this book, if i owned a copy. but fortunately i just borrowed this ebook from the library, so at least by deleting it i can get my gigabyte space back.