what a sly little rhetorical trick the title of this book performs. a guide for thoughtful parents--why, that almost makes it sound like the authors owhat a sly little rhetorical trick the title of this book performs. a guide for thoughtful parents--why, that almost makes it sound like the authors of this book want to help confused but well-meaning parents figure out how to support their trans children!
not so. the first chapter of this book declares that "it is highly questionable that a person needs lifelong medication to be their true self." my cisgender brother who is on antidepressants would like to speak to you. the second chapter puts forth the concepts of social contagion and "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" as truths, as if those haven't been debunked (and debunked) (and debunked) (and debunked) (and--do i need to keep going here?). there's a whole appendix about possible "coexisting conditions" that might trick kids into thinking they're trans--like autism and ADHD, because kids with autism and ADHD often feel lonely and might get swindled into transness by the promise of community (this is a line of rhetoric that hasn't been used against us before!), or OCD, because kids with OCD tend to ruminate (true) and might start wondering if they're trans (sure) and then ruminate their way into believing (?) that it's absolutely true and must be so and they need hormones right now (???) (not how ruminating works) (not how OCD works) (have you ever spoken to a person with OCD).
throughout the entire book, case study kids' preferred names are put in dubious quotes "like this," as if to indicate that those names are not their "real" "names." the fourth chapter is for real titled "parenting alternatives to affirmation." you know, for those parents who are worried they might be validating and respecting their child's autonomy and feelings a little too much. do you know what i would have done, age 14, had my parents found alternatives to affirming my transness? truthfully and literally killed myself. which is a course of action i am not recommending to the authors of this book because i don't want to get my account banned ...more
i don't even care if this is good i am in this stupid play stepp'd so far that returning were as tedious as go o'er
everyone in the early rpre-reading:
i don't even care if this is good i am in this stupid play stepp'd so far that returning were as tedious as go o'er
everyone in the early reviews for this like "it's bad" "it's underdeveloped" "i expected better from this author" failing to realize that these things make it a true shakespeare's a&c retelling
--
great news! one of those ^ was correct. immortal longings is bloated, unfocused, and absent of likable characters—which is to say, it is an excellent successor to shakespeare’s antony and cleopatra. unfortunately, i do care after all :( because i LIKE antony and cleopatra. i’m writing a thesis on that stupid play. i was unable to turn my brain off for one second reading this. which is impressive, seeing as back in april i forgot i was reading it. (okay, that's a lie. i got 40% in, then got frustrated with the book's habit of introducing new locations and POVs i do not care about, and then i realized that this makes it even truer to shakespeare's play, and then i got mad. and THEN i forgot.)
my having autism about shakespeare may be what you're all here for, but it does not a good critique make. so before i get to retelling thoughts, let me discuss this book on a craft level. in a word: it is bad. and i like plenty of books that are bad, but at least those are fun. this is a skeleton, cindy. this is bones. did gong have fun writing it? i hope so, but i can't tell from the product. there's nothing so-wild-it's-compelling here; there is, rather, a lot of nothing here. and it is 365 pages, so you understand that this is rather painful.
ON THE WORLDBUILDING
i don't know much about the kowloon walled cities. this was true before i started this book; it is perhaps truer now. this book is kowloon-noir-90s-cyberpunk antony and cleopatra. allegedly. i got perhaps traces of cyberpunk. mostly i got the impression that the dual cities of san-er are 1. dirty 2. crowded 3. poor. the people who live there are really poor and they live in really cramped conditions. it's pretty gross all the time. people work themselves to the bone and starve on the street. because the cities are so populated, they're crowded and everybody lives in each other's pockets. also, did you know that they're poor? because everybody is, like, really poor. and it's also crowded!
this book deffo has a problem when depicting poverty. because it's so intent on descriptions of filth and grime and hunger, it forgets that there's something under that. people. people who love each other and are capable of leading lives that mean something. yes, life in poverty may be miserable, but life in poverty is still worth something. instead, we get this off brand squid games, where everyone is robbed of the nuance and depth required to make effective commentary on desperation in poverty and the selfishness of the ruling class.”
i don't think there's malice here. it's just that gong is not interested in exploring poverty. nor is she interested in the kowloon walled city, or cyberpunk, or noir, or worldbuilding. you will read that the city is squalid and dirty, that the sun can't get through all the towering stacked buildings down to the street, that everyone is poor and dying of it. you will hear this once per chapter. i promise. there will be no further exploration of the culture developed by the people in these conditions, no hint at mutual aid or stirrings of rebellion or even how people spend their day-to-day lives. nor is the book interested in how things got this bad or what political structures uphold the status quo. the tyrant king is cartoonishly, one-dimensionally evil. to be fair, real-life kings and emperors are also frequently cartoonishly evil. but there's no sense of cold systemic brutality on the part of the aristocracy/empire. rather, there is one really really evil guy, and for some reason everyone does what he says. which is evil things.
but wait! there is another aspect of this worldbuilding! in this world, some (most?) people are born with the ability to leap into others' bodies, either body-snatching them from the occupants or being tossed out if the target body has a stronger qi (vital energy/life force). this is illegal, but everyone does it anyway.
"oh," you're thinking, "this is a retelling of a play extremely concerned with race(* (view spoiler)[okay, applying race to roman history is tricky, since our modern concept of race didn't exist back then; cleopatra was suspect for being a foreigner, but also specifically for being an eastern foreigner, and—got it, right, we move on (hide spoiler)]), gender, power, and the effect of fame on identity/the self. there's a lot to interrogate with body-jumping—the embodiment of qualities like race/gender, whose bodies are perceived as sacred vs. disposable, what it means to have a body and a self at all. i can't wait to see how this book explores those ideas!"
one would think! haha. we're not doing that. we are EMPHATICALLY uninterested in any of those things.
(i know i say this about every book, but this should have been MUCH more transgender. gender seems unimportant in san-er, which makes sense, but other than a few vague lines about calla being nonbinary or at least not attached to womanhood as a concept, we get NO fun funky gender exploration. calla and anton don't even have freaky genderweird bodyswap sex. it's just normal sex. so what is it all for?)
every year, san-er has the hunger games. with a few differences. first of all, the arena is the city itself; the players can go wherever they like. also, jumping is temporarily legal for the players (i think; i'm already forgetting), so they frequently grab the bodies of spectators and get those bodies grievously injured. it is never explained why everyone is chill with this. secondly, it's not actually necessary to kill the other competitors to win—you can instead disable your enemies' tracking wristbands, knocking them out of the running. it is never explained why everyone decides to kill each other anyway.
as you might think, both of these aspects make the book worse. it's surely possible to write compellingly about a whole city as a a battleground, where your home could be breached at any moment, whether you're in the games or not. but gong doesn't work with this tension. the lack of a confined arena kills any sense of urgency to the games, seeing as calla and anton can just chill in their swanky apartments instead of fighting people. it also makes it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief. sorry, i don't care how poor everyone is (LIKE, REALLY POOR, BTW!); i just don't believe that every single person is this comfortable with this level of random threat. and the wristband thing kneecaps the tension and makes the plot (especially the last 20%) deeply stupid. why is murder so frequent when anton easily steals a guy's wristband and deactivates it? why doesn't calla ever do that if she claims to feel so bad about murdering desperate poor people? (view spoiler)[why doesn't she just fuckin' tackle anton and deactivate his chip so they don't have to face off at the end? (hide spoiler)] i'm willing to accept explanations for why this wouldn't work—but none are given, which exposes it all as brutally contrived for drama.
"but," you ask, "at least the book does the hunger games thing of exploring constant surveillance and the TVification of violence, right? the shakespeare play is all about antony and cleopatra presenting themselves as legends to the world and to each other, trying to magnify themselves from famous to legends, something that would be exacerbated even further if they were literally on TV all the time and had to look badass for the cameras. the book does something with that, right?"
i think you know.
ON THE PROSE
If anyone saw them from afar, one might even think they were a couple taking a brisk morning stroll.
Maybe if couples these days went for matching bloodstains instead of wedding rings.
okay, god, don't make me GAG ON IT.
melodrama aside, the prose isn't awful. my main issue is that it reads like gong wishes she were writing a TV show rather than a novel. there's a tendency to privilege how cool something looks over a grounded interiority in the POV. which could be done really well, especially if we drew in literally any themes re: televised violence, but mostly it just feels clumsy. eg:
Calla is ready. That blur of motion comes closer, shoulder pitched down, not a single feature visible in the falling darkness. It doesn't matter: as soon as they are near enough, Calla kicks a foot onto the alley wall and somersaults, avoiding their hit and moving to land behind them. She doesn't crane her head to see; she only guesses. Her sword goes straight down her attacker's back—through the neck, then through the spine—before she has fully landed upon the ground yet.
Her boots thud heavily into the mud. She tugs her sword free. The attacker drops.
not terrible! but clunky for a scene that should be fast and tense. (cut that "yet," i'm begging.) the visual is obviously clear in gong's head. but you usually can't get that effect out of prose, which is rooted in the character's perspective and offers sensations and impressions over clearly-choreographed battle. (i say "usually" because i believe there is a talented writer out there for every "impossible" thing, but this isn't it.)
and honestly, i think this book would work better as a TV show, where the fight scenes could really sing and we could get some colorful neo-noir city backdrops. this wouldn't make the thin-ass characters any better, but it would at least reduce the amount of filler prose. i do believe i could cut at least 10% of this book by taking out the redundant adjectives, inefficient sentences, and repeated information. (jumping is illegal but everyone turns a blind eye unless you're nobility i know i KNOW i know I KNOW!!!) imagine if gong spent a fraction of that time on actually giving her characters character.
ON THE CHARACTERS
the best part of this book is that octavius caesar is a bleach blond. real as hell and added to my belief system.
like shakespeare's antony and cleopatra, this book is bloated with meaningless, forgettable side characters. august (octavian) is the most interesting; there's a hint of unreliability to his POV, a suggestion that his desire for power is far less selfless than he tells himself. galipei (agrippa) is interesting for similar reasons—how far are you willing to go for the man you love? (at least, i assume he's supposed to be gay for real, or that joke about him being in love with august is looking pretty tasteless)—but criminally underutilized. the pampi thread was set up to go somewhere, then ended in blunt anticlimax. i don't give a shit about calla's convenient helpful lesbians (who were her attendants first, and yet seem to have no feelings about endangering their lives on the daily for an exiled princess, nor do they have any political/class opinions themselves). there is a kid and he shows up to die.
unlike shakespeare's antony and cleopatra, though, this book's main couple isn't unlikable because they're shitty people. they're unlikable because they aren't characters. they're vague stock cutouts. with anton, i can almost believe this is deliberate. his entire thing is that his birth body was repossessed by the crown and he's been flitting between transient forms for years. i will admit: i do like this as a character foil point, since calla never body-jumps at all. and this could be in delicious conversation with shakespeare's antony's increasingly shaky grip on his masculinity—for it's masculinity by which he defines himself, and so his loss of masculinity is also a loss of selfhood, a loss of antony-ness.
haha lmfao who am i kidding. this book is doing NOTHING with that. i will award one (1) more point because anton's main criteria for which bodies to borrow is "are they sexy?." but he's neither recognizably mark antony nor interesting in his own right. he's mysterious. he has a tragic backstory. he flirts like a bad boy. he calls calla princess all the time. that's all i've got.
i will get to calla momentarily, but on that note: having paper cutouts for characters makes it really hard to write convincing romance, or even convincing sexual tension. one of my reading notes was "do these cunts even like each other?," and the answer is, of course, no, because there's nothing there to like or dislike. allegedly, this book centers around obsessive love/lust. this is not so. anton and calla spend the first half of the book entirely unobsessive about each other. they are business partners who think the other person is maybe hot theoretically but mostly annoying. plus the book keeps wandering into side characters who do not matter. then we start getting random sprinkles of sexual tension, until, at the 75% mark, anton and calla have sex and suddenly they're so obsessed with each other they're willing to endanger multi-year plans so they can keep boning.
also? it's not even a good sex scene! we get a "getting hard during a fight so the fight turns into sex" thing, but the characters are nothingburger, so it's not even fun! calla stabs anton's chest (lightly) during the fight part, but the ensuing sex part isn't even that bloody, and she's all "does that hurt :(" and he's all [breathy sigh] "everything you do hurts, princess" and i guess they do missionary? FINGER HIS WOUND IF YOU'RE NASTY.
but their sex is flavorless, because they are flavorless. i've left it too long. let's talk about calla.
ON RETELLING, WHICH IS TO SAY, ON CLEOPATRA
what drew me to this book (other than my pathological thing for shakespeare's a&c) was cleopatra and body-jumping. infinite variety, y'know? it is perhaps appropriate to mention that i'm writing a thesis on cleopatra. i'm not an expert; i'm an undergrad. but i think about her more than the average person. and being a shakespeare guy, i think about specifically shakespeare's cleopatra a lot—her metatheatricality, her charm, her cleverness, her emotional extremes, her passion and poise, her grandiosity.
as it turns out, calla is the only character in this world who doesn't body-jump. which goes against my intuition—that cleopatra, as a character who is constantly performing(*(view spoiler)[here i am legally required to link the fitz article, which posits that cleopatra's "infinite variety" is a conscious tool she wields to maintain power as a woman, especially as her physical beauty ages (hide spoiler)]), would jump all the time and never show her true self. but, i realized, this actually makes sense. cleopatra's draw is her unexpectedness. in a world where jumping is mundane, of course calla is standout for refusing to do it.
i do like that aspect! just as i like the plot twist, even if i think it could have been foreshadowed more artfully (and i have some logistical questions that i assume/hope/pray gong will address in the sequel). calla's refusal to jump isn't the problem with her character. it's everything else about her.
"Bold of you to be saying such words when I could have you executed."
"Bold of you to threaten to execute me when I could gut you this very second."
"Ah," August sighs, reaching for the teapot. He pours Calla her cup, but she makes no move to touch it. "Here I was, thinking your bloodlust would fade with time."
Calla stares at him, saying nothing. If anything, she is only more unhinged now.
for fuck’s sake. terribly silly to tell me in the narrative that your main character is “unhinged.” this is emblematic of the first calla problem: that chloe gong DESPERATELY wants you to think calla is cool. every other character is constantly thinking about how fierce and badass and unhinged and uncontrollable and edgy she is. she can’t just be good at fighting with swords—she has to be the unbeatable best, so good that she isn’t even stressed about the games because she knows she’ll never lose a fight (re: the teeth-pulling lack of tension). there’s a part where anton is thinking “ooooo calla is so FIERCE she could EAT ME ALIVE” and what she’s doing is walking around him in a circle looking at him closely. i am begging you to be serious.
the second calla problem is encapsulated by this pair of quotes:
Calla Tuoleimi, princess of Er. She could do nothing on a throne, but she can do everything with a sword in her hand. . Calla hardly plans in advance. She establishes one concrete end goal, then rams through whatever barriers stand between herself and the result.
this character is supposed to be cleopatra. you know, the polyglot who took control of a precariously-positioned nation before the age of twenty-five, who maneuvered egypt almost out of rome’s hands entirely, who went down in history as one of the savviest and most persuasive leaders of the ancient world. calla is not cleopatra. calla is nothing. calla is a generic action movie character. calla is a girlboss who kicks ass and looks pretty doing it. gone is the woman of staggering persuasiveness, charm, and strategy, replaced by an edgy impulsive ~morally gray~ marvel-movie hero who, like, has cleopatra bangs, i guess.
to be clear, the problem isn't that gong strays from shakespeare’s version. i don’t think any retelling should be graded on accuracy. the entire point is to explore a famous story from a different angle; any good retelling will bring something new to the table, otherwise i'd just read the original again. but the changes made should add something to the story. what bothers me about the cleopatra —> calla change is that gong has managed to make one of the most interesting people of all time fucking boring.
literally fucking play minecraft. i'm serious. if you want to know what reading this book is like, build yourself a nice little house and grow some whliterally fucking play minecraft. i'm serious. if you want to know what reading this book is like, build yourself a nice little house and grow some wheat and figure out how to tame a dog and—well, actually, you should play on peaceful mode, because crusoe never once has to deal with a natural predator. but you’ll get the idea of it pretty quick without having to experience the bludgeoningly tedious prose, the absolutely insufferable narrator, or defoe's obsession with repeating the same religious and spiritual realizations nearly word-for-word every five pages until shit like "it can always get worse" and "we live in a society" has been thoroughly pile-driven into your head.
barring minecraft, if you actually want to read a book, read hatchet—yes, the one for middle schoolers—because that book actually has the balls to put its hero in danger without placing every single item he needs for his survival directly into his hands. also, way less racist.
as someone who likes classic literature, as someone who read the shakespearean canon for fun: every single page of this book was like being on the rack. i am actually deeply staggered i was able to finish this book, and deeply staggered that it only took twelve days, because the constant unrelenting level of redundant and uninteresting detail made it feel like twelve centuries. i know i frequently rag on tolstoy for his redundancy, but at least his book was over a thousand pages so the boring shit kind of got spaced out. i'm sorry i said that about you mr. tolstoy i didn't know how good i had it please come back i'll even suck your [EXTREMELY LOUD GAME SHOW BEEP NOISE]
also, super super fucking racist! robinson's island is basically a colonizer's fantasy (no natives, no predators, nothing but a wealth of resources for him to strip-mine), and he proceeds to dehumanize and subject every person of color he meets. and look, i understand that we can (and in some cases should) use racist classical literature to understand the history of racism and colonialism, and i understand that the musings on society and religion and human nature in this book are all very studyable, as are the deep-running colonialist themes. but i also know that there are other books in the world that explore these ideas without making the experience of reading into an extended form of the sort of torture the geneva convention was intended to prevent. and yes, i understand that this is the first english-language novel ever written. but i also know that the english have written a couple other things since 1719. shh, england. shh. it’s okay. you’re okay. we can let this one go, okay? i know you liked robinson in the 1720s, but he’s getting very old and he’s honestly always been boring as hell and i think the only humane option is to put him down....more
have no memory of this book except that i read it way too young and was immediately turned off by the amount of violence against women (emotional, moshave no memory of this book except that i read it way too young and was immediately turned off by the amount of violence against women (emotional, mostly, but there was also a line where the protag was like [assault tw] (view spoiler)["maybe i raped her, but i don't feel bad about it" (hide spoiler)] or SOMETHING the fuck like that. again. i don't remember it very well but i was like what the fuck). screaming crying throwing up do NOT compare this to catcher in the rye or lolita are you kidding me. holden caulfield was a traumatized teenager, not a grown ass man who claims he likes hurting girls, & i haven't read lolita but i know that girl was a victim instead of a villain
you know, sometimes you revisit books you used to love and discover they still hold up. and sometimes they’re the mortal instruments.
honestly, i couldyou know, sometimes you revisit books you used to love and discover they still hold up. and sometimes they’re the mortal instruments.
honestly, i could type “cassandra clare wrote harry potter incest fanfiction” and end the review right here. because she did. she did do that. do you know how much i wish i could forget she did that. and yeah yeah separate the art from the artist or whatever, blah blah blah, but in this case you… really, really can’t, because cassandra clare is so obsessed with having her sibling characters kiss each other. (view spoiler)[ and yes, i know that clary and jace aren’t ACTUALLY siblings, but 1) they think they are. for a LONG time, iirc. and they keep making out anyway, and 2) TWO OR THREE BOOKS DOWN THE LINE CLARY ENDS UP KISSING HER ACTUAL BROTHER ANYWAY. [side note: i’m so mad that i remember all of this. hell hath no fury like a middle schooler with a hyperfixation, i guess.] (hide spoiler)] on an objective level, this book probably deserves two stars, but this is the main reason i’m giving it one. (and yes, i do think you can write meaningful stories about incest and the effect incest has on the people involved. however, i do not think cassandra “incest is so hot” clare is trying to write about the trauma of incest. just a hunch. i can't be assed to find the tweet i'm thinking of rn but i can try to dig it up if anyone wants)
but okay. even wiping all of that aside — the book just… isn’t that good. there are some cool concepts here. there are a lot of cool concepts, actually! of course, we don’t know how many of those cassandra clare actually came up with — but i digress. the atmosphere/vibes are probably the best part of the book, but the worldbuilding is legitimately interesting (if sometimes irrational. why don’t any of you use cars), and i even liked some of the characters! (hi, isabelle; hi, my beloved, magnus bane.) the plot isn’t super strong (it’s kind of just the protagonists Doing Stuff until they bumble into answers), but i could have dealt with that. what exhausts me is the way the book presents these cool concepts and then squanders them to be all the worst parts of the YA genre.
god, the girl hate in this book. the NUMBER of times clary thinks bitchy things about isabelle, because oh nooooo, isabelle is TALL and THIN and has NICE BOOBS and clary is SHORT and “CUTE” but not “BEAUTIFUL” and she has NO BOOBS OH NOOOOOO. get me a goddamn aspirin. the way she’s so convinced isabelle is some kind of ice queen out to rip boys’ hearts out instead of… you know. a fellow sixteen-year-old who is a real person and even seems to be friendly toward clary. and this would be fine if there was ever any indication clary is in the wrong, but apparently it’s natural for girls to never be friends, only ever at each others’ throats (and not even in the gay way, man, come on). there IS a vague attempt to smooth this over in the epilogue with some lines about how isabelle has never had a friend who’s a girl before, but she can learn how, but that feels so insufficient when everything written in the text seems to go against the idea that girls can be friends at all. like, if you’re gonna give us the girl hate, give us some solidarity, too! (also, shoutout to all the gender stereotyping and vaguely homophobic jokes, while i’m talking about this.)
plus the romance. jesus christ. take the siblings thing out. it’s still terrible. jace is supposed to be sexy, i think, and i’ll admit some of his lines are funny, but overall he is absolutely intolerable. i’m so sick of “bad boy” asshole love interests who are genuinely disrespectful of the protagonist’s wishes and autonomy. i’m so sick of flawed characters whose flaws are used only to make them more pathetic/sympathetic/lovable and not, you know, addressed as character flaws that need fixing. and dear god, i do not care how hot he is: if someone went into MY room when i wasn’t there and snooped in MY private sketchbook/notebook/journal, i would beat their ass. you’ve got a stele? i have these hands. catch them, motherfucker.
clary herself is… also insufferable. i wanted to like her, especially because i sympathize with the narrative forces pushing her into the arms of said asshole love interest, but she’s honestly not much better than he is. less surface-level obnoxious, but she’s incredibly judgmental of everyone around her. she asks a bunch of nosy questions about alec’s sexuality as if it’s any of her business (and even comes close to dangling it over his head when he’s clearly closeted and the shadowhunters are CLEARLY homophobic as an institution). she takes the first chance she gets to call (view spoiler)[luke (hide spoiler)] a filthy downworlder or whatever. what can i say except that she has a constant vibe like she’s waiting to call somebody a slur. i would not trust clary to use my pronouns. i wouldn’t! isabelle and alec would use my pronouns. clary would not and she would get huffy if i corrected her.
also, the writing isn’t terrible, but it isn’t as gorgeous and evocative as i thought when i was twelve, either. sometimes it’s outright awkward.
“Well, he lives here with you,” Clary pointed out. “Doesn’t he?”
Isabelle nodded. “Well, yes, but…”
“Why doesn’t he live with his own parents?”
For a fleeting moment Isabelle looked uncomfortable. “Because they’re dead.”
Clary’s mouth opened in surprise. “Did they die in an accident?”
girl. what. that’s such a weird fucking response to hearing that someone’s parents died? i know clary’s dad died in an accident, but you’d think that very fact would give her a little more tact. also, why is she so nosy, but ONLY about jace? not about the literal magic and demons? this conversation is so clearly written this way so cassandra clare can shoehorn in jace backstory without having to get there naturally.
“…you have fangs and claws at your disposal.”
“All the better to tear your heart out with.”
Valentine shook his head. “You tore my heart out years ago,” he said, and even Clary could not tell if the sorrow in his voice was real or feigned. “When you betrayed and deserted me.”
did valentine come from the disney school of villain monologuing. why is EVERYTHING he says so over-the-top, and not even in a self-aware leaning-into-and-selling-the-villain-thing way?
honestly, i get why i used to love these books. i get why so many people do! but i think it's important to recognize their flaws and some of the honestly-really-gross shit going on in them. and when i say recognize their flaws, for me, personally, i mean "tear the shit out of them in my best friend's dms because my god these books are not well written." and in that regard, at least, you know what? i'm having fun. now, am i going to KEEP reading them? you will find that out at the exact moment i do because i've no idea.
yes i did speedrun the last two chapters of this so it doesn't become my 100th book of the year. love and light...more
this book felt like being promised a cake and then handed a bowl containing flour, vanilla, and a raw egg. “but this isn’t a cake,” hypothetical me sathis book felt like being promised a cake and then handed a bowl containing flour, vanilla, and a raw egg. “but this isn’t a cake,” hypothetical me says, “this is just the ingredients for a cake, but you haven’t done anything with them,” but there’s no answer, so hypothetical me eats a raw egg. this book felt like eating a raw egg.
to say that in a slightly more normal way: i was really excited for this one. i remember loving whaley's Highly Illogical Behavior, so i vaguely trusted the author, and the synopsis of this promised all kinds of cool things! sibling relationships! rare woodpecker plot line! grief! religion! Finding Meaning! and the book sure did have all the ingredients for a good story! it’s just that we never fucking did anything with them.
this book was chock-full of Stuff Happening — cullen’s cousin overdosing, cullen’s brother disappearing, cullen’s subplot with his best friend and with the girl he kind-of-almost dates, a COMPLETELY out-of-left-field plotline about a missionary — and yet it felt like nothing actually happened at all, because not a single event in this book was given emotional weight. the prose was intensely wooden; the writing itself seemed to hold the reader at arm’s length. we were told to care, but not shown why we should. cullen claimed to be upset about his brother’s disappearance and his cousin’s death (side note: i didn’t like the depiction of the cousin who OD’d, either; it wasn’t blatantly bad, but it sure didn’t feel empathetic toward people struggling with addiction), but all he really spends time doing is shitting on the town (despite claiming to be an idealist) and talking about the girl he kind of wants to bone. who was a much more interesting character than he was, imo, but who never really got page time, because there was so much going on in this book and the book just did not delve into ANY of it. i kept asking myself how the book could possibly have so many interesting dynamics set up and how it could possibly still fall so flat. i desperately wanted to love it, but i didn't care about jack shit that was happening here.
i would call this a solid two star read, but by the ending (which. man. what the fuck was the ending, but i digress), i was so sick of reading it when i could have been reading the latest hyperfixation material instead that i am now actively irritated. one star and i’m off to read my stupid little history plays...more
on a technical level this book was better than the first one but also? this is the book where the ONLY named woman of color CHOOSES to let herself be on a technical level this book was better than the first one but also? this is the book where the ONLY named woman of color CHOOSES to let herself be brutally murdered for the SOLE PURPOSE of MOTIVATING the white protagonist. also being better than the first book on a technical level is a very low bar so not only is it incredibly racist but it also is just bad...more
"this book is really fucking bad, but at least it's, like, entertaining, so two stars," said i, before i reread some excerpts from this book and reali"this book is really fucking bad, but at least it's, like, entertaining, so two stars," said i, before i reread some excerpts from this book and realized that it is actually just really really fucking bad. 0/10 stars for worldbuilding -10/10 stars for thee misogyny...more
reading through the reviews of this book and they all make very good points (the main character is a non-character whose main moment of characterizatireading through the reviews of this book and they all make very good points (the main character is a non-character whose main moment of characterization is calling a stranger an "utter freak" in her internal monologue; i was going to add another bad thing about this book but i genuinely can't remember it well enough to do so) but i will admit i am a little taken aback by no one addressing... the RAMPANT ableism. like. maybe that's par for the course with thrillers, but it still isn't excusable. then again, it might be that the ableism stands out due to my personal experiences. here are the main things i recall about this book:
1) the villain - a rapist, kidnapper, and murderer - is depicted as obsessed with cleanliness to a compulsive degree. i mean he goes after women and especially prostitutes because they're "dirty" and then he showers constantly to cope with the dirtiness of the world because it makes him "itch"
2) i read this book at the part of my life where i was developing devastating obsessive-compulsive symptoms that put me in actual danger.
look, it's a wattpad book; i don't know what i expected, but a friend lent this to me when i was fourteen and had bad taste and even then i knew it fucking sucked. few books have made me as angry as this one; i would rate it 0 stars if possible; i am still waiting on my gold-embossed hand-lettered painstakingly-crafted apology letter from natasha preston & etc etc etc....more
one star for the concepts and the shakespeare. look, i understand and appreciate the conversation mr. huxley was trying to have. but, like... noah fenone star for the concepts and the shakespeare. look, i understand and appreciate the conversation mr. huxley was trying to have. but, like... noah fence... couldn't he have put his social analysis and philosophizing into a story that was... even a LITTLE bit good? even a little? there was genuinely no plot in this book. i literally did not care about any characters. not one (1) character. according to the notes at the end of this book, when it was first published, a reporter stated that "Mr. Huxley does not really care for the story - the idea alone excites him." and, like. what else is there to say?...more
I don’t need to write a review for Ready Player One, because Ready Player One is its own judge, jury, and executioner. Please observe:
RP1, page 193-19I don’t need to write a review for Ready Player One, because Ready Player One is its own judge, jury, and executioner. Please observe:
RP1, page 193-194: [“You could also purchase an ACHD (anatomically correct haptic doll) if you wanted to have more ‘intimate’ encounters inside the OASIS… Driven by loneliness, curiosity, and raging teen hormones, I’d purchased a midrange ACHD, the Shaptic UberBetty, a few weeks after Art3mis stopped speaking to me. After spending several highly unproductive days inside a stand-alone brothel simulation called the Pleasuredome, I’d gotten rid of the doll, out of a combination of shame and self-preservation. I’d wasted thousands of credits, missed a whole week of work, and was on the verge of completely abandoning my quest for the egg when I confronted the grim reality that virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation. At the end of the day, I was still a virgin, all alone in a dark room, humping a lubed-up robot. So I got rid of the ACHD and went back to spanking the monkey the old-fashioned way.
I felt no shame about masturbating. Thanks to Anorak’s Almanac, I now thought of it as a normal bodily function, as necessary and natural as sleeping or eating.
AA 241:87 - I would argue that masturbation is the human animals’ most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right - including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein would never have made their discoveries if they hadn’t first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or “knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom”). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe.]
Like I said. The book speaks for itself. But I’m gonna write a review anyway, because the most fun part of reading Ready Player One was observing what makes Ready Player One suck so much. At its heart, RP1 relies entirely on references and nostalgia value to hide its lack of plot, characters, and setting. The result is just page after page of jokes about 80s media, strung together by a weak attempt at theme with no heart behind it. And the more I think about it, the angrier I get that I wasted a sizable chunk of time reading it.
Setting The setting was… fine. The main problem wasn’t with the rules or concept of the OASIS; it was with the idea that the main characters were fighting against some sort of fascist corporate overlord. The IOI company and workers were meant to be the antagonists, but they were never given any bite. Beyond regulating the previously free OASIS and instituting a user fee, there is no explanation given to what their plans with the network are. Their “villainy” is hardly ever elaborated on and the company is repeatedly and consistently too stupid to be believable - they do murder a few people, but even the punch of this is taken out because the main character 1) is barely affected by these murders and 2) constantly outsmarts the company again and again, almost without effort.
Plot The plot was… less fine, which has to do entirely with Cline’s writing style. The quality of the prose devolved RAPIDLY as the book progressed. The dialogue got more and more stilted and there were a ton of awkwardly placed exposition dumps - nearly every important plot moment was interrupted by parenthetical asides, adding information about the setting that should have been included earlier, or over-explaining all the video game references. The whole thing was infused with “gamer culture,” and while this began as just using video game terminology and calling people “noobs,” it got more and more insufferable. Cline gives a half-assed attempt at diversity by giving the main character some token minority friends to follow him around, but he still writes his characters calling each other “girls,” “twinks,” and “f*gs,” all meant as insults. The narrative is never the slightest bit critical of this behavior; the character later revealed to be a lesbian (whom the main character initially thought was a straight man) never speaks up about it. Also there was this gem: “Are you a woman? And by that I mean are you a human female who has never had a sex-change operation?” All I can envision is Cline hunched over his keyboard in the dark, tapping out this line, and nodding self-assuredly: “Oh yeah, I am the funniest motherfucker on the planet.”
But the problems were worse than just casual bigotry here and there. There’s an old writing tip that says “show, don’t tell.” While a certain amount of telling is necessary in a book (that’s why it’s not a movie, after all), there was a total lack of showing any detail in Ready Player One, and the whole thing fell REALLY flat. This was what contributed most to the insincerity of the writing - the reader is told that the main character, Wade, is feeling a certain way, or that the IOI workers are corporate fascists, but we’re never given any evidence and the whole thing feels just as half-assed as the “diversity.” This insincerity was combined in a deadly combo with terrible pacing: the most important parts of the story are CONSTANTLY skimmed over. We’re told that Wade and his love interest, Art3mis, talk every night and build a strong relationship - but we never get to witness any of their conversations, leaving both characters underdeveloped and their relationship empty. Wade’s friendships with the other important characters are equally passed over. The reader gets to read a page of textual wanking about the actual concept of wanking, but we don’t get to see why Wade actually likes his girlfriend or how he knows he can trust his friends. That’s… that’s great.
The worst victims of the constant skimming of important data are the “gates” that Wade and his companions have to struggle to pass through to get closer to the egg they’re hunting for. Each gate is a reenactment of an 80s film or video game. Because of this, Cline can’t print the whole thing in full, so what occurs is that the most important parts of the quest are covered in about two or three paragraphs each - just long enough to summarize which 80s media it’s referencing and how easy it is for Wade to pass through.
This combination of fake emotion and skimming over important events was what really killed this book for me. But the characters weren’t much better. The real problem with the characters was that they were extremely passive - they didn’t actively try to do much; things just sort of… happened to them. Wade and his friends don’t win in the end because of what they actually tried to do; they win because of a stupid deus ex machina that just happened to them, because they were lucky.
Characters Wade Watts, the main character, had pretty much no personality beyond “knows stuff about the 80s.” He was just a nerd archetype - the beaten-down, bullied, underdog protagonist who outsmarts everyone around him and basically serves as a Mary-Sue self-insert for the author. There’s literally a scene where Wade proves he knows more about the 80s than a guy who “bullies” him and literally everyone claps for him. I don’t like to use the word “cringeworthy,” but damn.
The small amounts of personality he did show were enough to prove he is literally a terrible person. There is a scene wherein the IOI company threatens to blow up Wade’s IRL home, a trailer park “stack” of trailers, which would bring the entire stack crashing down and kill dozens of people. Wade is not currently in his home, so he calls their bluff and guess what? They blow the place up. Wade spends about… a page and a half bemoaning the loss of his beloved family, “Bitchy Aunt” and “Random Old Lady Mentioned Once.” Later on in the book, he mentions being mildly suicidal (before this too is swept under the rug because we need to focus on the REFERENCES). Has he finally gotten over his shock and been overcome by grief that he caused his family’s death? Nah, he’s sad because his girlfriend dumped him. I don’t remember him sparing another thought for his dead family. (Also, he stalks his love interest and he doesn’t vote, which are both counts against him in my opinion.)
Art3mis, said love interest, was also an archetype - the perfect “manic pixie dream girl” who’s NOT a fake geek girl, she’s a REAL geek girl. Wow. She was basically the Token Female. There’s a point where all four of Wade’s team members get robot avatars to fight with, and Art3mis’s robot shoots lasers out of its breasts. Ok, Cline, we get it! She’s the Girl! A tiddy robot. What we did see of Art3mis was actually pretty endearing, though, which was why I was so frustrated when her character and relationship with Wade ended up being so underdeveloped.
Daito and Shoto were the two Token Asians, both of whom performed exaggerated bows and called everyone “san,” and one of whom inevitably got killed off. Not much else to say about them.
Aech, Wade’s best friend, was in my opinion the most developed character and not gonna lie, I would die for her. Aech is the person who is viewed as a straight white man for most of the book and is later revealed to be a Black lesbian; she chose a white male avatar because of a noted difference in how people treated her. While I understand what Cline was trying to do here, I think this plot point should have been revealed earlier in the book so it could have been developed more. Even so, Aech was in my opinion the most interesting character. (In my ideal world, Art3mis and Aech elope and leave Wade to cry.)
Theme Really, the lack thereof. Cline briefly tries to pull a “escapism is bad and you need to spend time in the real world, not waste your life on the internet!” theme, which would have been fine if, you know, the whole book hadn’t been repeatedly emphasizing how the OASIS simulation made everything possible for the main character, allowed for his success, and put joy into his life. I honestly don’t think Cline really even tried to write a theme; it was painfully obvious that it was shoehorned in at the last minute with little revision.
man, we... we all know this one sucks, right? like... we're at a point now, as a society, where we can admit this is ass?? it reads like fanfiction. bman, we... we all know this one sucks, right? like... we're at a point now, as a society, where we can admit this is ass?? it reads like fanfiction. bellatrix and voldemort had a baby. imagine society if jk rowling did not exist...more
max theodore
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Books:
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