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A review by hannah_hethmon
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
2.0
There’s a great short story in here, but it’s buried under endless pages of dull, plodding, repetitive, moralizing prose. The timeline moves back and forth between pasts and present so frequently and without demarcation that I was constantly going back pages to try and figure out what was happening. And somehow, despite all that prose, there’s no character development. This is intentionally a main character who is basically the same person in the past and the apocalyptic future, boring and mediocre in both, which is so boring to read.
Spoilers below:
And it’s so obvious very early on that this story is going to end with the wall around zone one falling and everyone dying, but the journey there is not particularly interesting. The final section of the book ends with a description of a wall falling, and then you have to get through pages and pages more of plodding prose and pointless flashbacks to the past until you return to the wall falling and finally everyone dies in a predictable way.
Spoilers below:
And it’s so obvious very early on that this story is going to end with the wall around zone one falling and everyone dying, but the journey there is not particularly interesting. The final section of the book ends with a description of a wall falling, and then you have to get through pages and pages more of plodding prose and pointless flashbacks to the past until you return to the wall falling and finally everyone dies in a predictable way.