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ashleylm 's review for:
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
by Donald Antrim
This would be 3 1/2 stars if Goodreads had a better scale (why not out of a hundred? If you can't make such fine distinctions, rank books as 0/20/40/60/80/100 like they do on Criticker sometimes) ... it's very well-written, held my interest throughout, but I have to really enjoy a book to give it 4 stars, not just find it worthy. But it succeeds at what it set out to do and I have no editing suggestions, so I'm rounding up. (5 stars are for all-time favourites--the creme-de-la-creme).
This weird, strange book shows how to do weird and strange in a compelling and elegant manner (take that, Welcome to Night Vale!). There is a central conceit (society has collapsed in some unspecified way and Americans have increasingly turned violent) that is played out in a polite suburban setting, and then there is a dollop of extra weirdness (some dangerous identification with a spirit animal) that may be related to the central conceit, or may not, but if it was I didn't see it. And all the strangeness and weirdness springs naturally from the central conceit (aside from the spirit animal business), and makes sense, given the context (whereas Night Vale, which I also just finished, has a zillion inexplicable unrelated oddities that I found offputting).
It's an amusing book, but also a very dark book (it would have to be), with an especially upsetting ending (although it could be worse, I guess). As others have said, this one will stay with you. Not my cup of tea, because I vastly prefer Pride and Prejudice to Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, put I appreciated the satire, and have learned that I do prefer my post-apocalyptic fiction to be suburban-set rather than upon miles of dusty roads.
Oh, and because this may make a difference either way to undecided potential readers, this reads like Literature and not like Genre Fiction, not to suggest in any way that Literature is automatically better than Genre Fiction (any more than Classical Music beats Pop Music), just that they're not the same thing at all (see many, many essays on the increasingly blurred difference).
This weird, strange book shows how to do weird and strange in a compelling and elegant manner (take that, Welcome to Night Vale!). There is a central conceit (society has collapsed in some unspecified way and Americans have increasingly turned violent) that is played out in a polite suburban setting, and then there is a dollop of extra weirdness (some dangerous identification with a spirit animal) that may be related to the central conceit, or may not, but if it was I didn't see it. And all the strangeness and weirdness springs naturally from the central conceit (aside from the spirit animal business), and makes sense, given the context (whereas Night Vale, which I also just finished, has a zillion inexplicable unrelated oddities that I found offputting).
It's an amusing book, but also a very dark book (it would have to be), with an especially upsetting ending (although it could be worse, I guess). As others have said, this one will stay with you. Not my cup of tea, because I vastly prefer Pride and Prejudice to Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, put I appreciated the satire, and have learned that I do prefer my post-apocalyptic fiction to be suburban-set rather than upon miles of dusty roads.
Oh, and because this may make a difference either way to undecided potential readers, this reads like Literature and not like Genre Fiction, not to suggest in any way that Literature is automatically better than Genre Fiction (any more than Classical Music beats Pop Music), just that they're not the same thing at all (see many, many essays on the increasingly blurred difference).