I went into this Hunger Games spinoff not knowing anything, including that it was a prequel. I'd also forgotten almost everything about the original tI went into this Hunger Games spinoff not knowing anything, including that it was a prequel. I'd also forgotten almost everything about the original trilogy including everything about President Snow so I also didn't realize this was going to be a villain origin story.
Overall, I thought that Collins handled Coriolanus' psychological progression really well - from a boy reckoning with hunger and trauma to a man who finally crosses the line from an innate sense of horror about subjecting people to the Hunger Games to the justification of it. Collins also gives us other characters who face the same horrors but come to different conclusions: his sister Tigris, his frenemy Sejanus, his tribute Lucy. So I think the point is made that crossing that line is a choice, or comes from a series of choices. Yet, with the exception of Tigris, all the characters have moral blindspots and are not free from causing others harm.
I do agree with others that the ending felt rushed and less intentional then the rest of the book.
One thing I wonder is if Collins ever toyed with the idea of telling the story from multiple perspectives; I would have been interested in Lucy's perspective, for example.
Even though I devoured the original trilogy, I found that in the ensuing decade+ that I am finding it more difficult to stomach the brutality and violence inherent in this story. It is not a criticism of the book, but a reflection on myself as a consumer of books and other media. ...more
Well, this was the weirdest thing I've read in a long time
The graphic novel's avant-garde style perfectly encapsulates the feeling of dread and hel4.5
Well, this was the weirdest thing I've read in a long time
The graphic novel's avant-garde style perfectly encapsulates the feeling of dread and helplessness many feel when thinking of the power of corporations, especially Big Tech, have over our lives. ...more
This was a fast read, in part because Atwood really knows how to pace a novel but also because the design of the book results in a lot of white space This was a fast read, in part because Atwood really knows how to pace a novel but also because the design of the book results in a lot of white space pages. So whatever page number your edition has, just imagine it 20% shorter.
I really liked the structure of the book and how the three narrators' stories started to come together - brilliantly exactly at the 50% mark. Atwood is excellent at differentiating character voice through sentence structure and disposition. However, as in other of her books, Atwood has a bit of a tin ear for youth dialogue and a penchant for inserting rhymes that don't match her excellent prose.
Although this is a dystopia, at its core this book is a spy novel. Its the story of a Resistance movement and of agents and double agents. It was really well-done!
I've read Handmaid's Tale at least three times, but the last reading was over 10 years ago and I didn't watch the Hulu series, so I trusted Atwood to revisit some of that world enough for me to re-enter it - and she did. This time around I felt like the world-building of Gilead was a bit incomplete, and I'd need to revisit HT to see if it was developed more there.
I've read some criticism that HT is classic white middle-class feminism, and I can see that...Race is nowhere to be found except in the awkward analogy of the "Underground Femaleroad", and we never get interior thoughts of the underclass Econowives or Marthas.
This sequel is a very Canadian book, moreso I think than HT. When I first read HT, which is set in the ruins of Harvard and Cambridge, I was living in Massachusetts so the setting made the story very visceral to me. When characters tried to escape to Canada, I thought of that country as more of a metaphor - a vague place where draft dodgers and escaped slaves ran to in the past. Now I live in Canada, and have more of a sense about the culture of Canada and how it relates to the US. Canada has long been nervous of its neighbo(u)r to the south and has a bit of a smug moral sense of itself in comparison to America. You can see both of these things in The Testaments.
Canada has also been engaged in trying to reduce its own moral debt to the Indigenous nations it tried to wipe out with its efforts at Reconciliation. Sometimes these efforts can feel tacked on as they do in the epilogue to The Testaments where there is a brief cameo of an Indigenous character and a brief territorial acknowledgment.
In short, the book was an uneven effort, but still worth the read. I'm excited to hear Margaret Atwood at a speaking engagement later this week!...more
I got excited at the beginning about a book about a time-traveling female soldier who sees the unfairness of the dystopic life she lives in ruled by mI got excited at the beginning about a book about a time-traveling female soldier who sees the unfairness of the dystopic life she lives in ruled by mega-corporations. But for me, the big interesting ideas in the book were deployed a bit too bluntly: there's lots of speechifying about the dangers of unchecked capitalism and the nature of freedom and the costs of war. Lots of speechifying. Also, writing a time-travel book has to be the hardest thing in the world, and I think I understand what happened with the timeline stuff, but it all got pretty confusing for awhile but not in a way that I super enjoyed - the payoff was lacking for me....more
Yeah it was good! I think the idea of checking in on Earth, and then intermingling a new crew of people from Earth with the sentient beings on Pax wasYeah it was good! I think the idea of checking in on Earth, and then intermingling a new crew of people from Earth with the sentient beings on Pax was a brilliant idea and created a lot of interesting dynamics.
For me, the biggest flaw was that the villain of the story remains a mystery. You don't get a sense of what the villain is really all about or get to know them in any meaningful way. That made the climax of the book feel a bit rushed and messy.
There was also a cute twist at the end that, for me at least, was commenting on the idea of gender and gender power as a construct. This had been a theme throughout the book, but the way Burke put a button on it at the end was very clever. ...more
As with The Power, this book was more of a novelization of an idea, rather than a novel with convincing characters or plot - and was also poorly writtAs with The Power, this book was more of a novelization of an idea, rather than a novel with convincing characters or plot - and was also poorly written (for my taste) although I can't tell if it's the original style of the author or how the translator interpreted the Norwegian.
The author wanted to talk about bees and the terrifying phenomenon of colony collapse disorder and speculate about the impact on human agriculture should bees completely disappear (although she doesn't really spend any time on any other pollinators such as bats or butterflies). This is one of those books where you can see how the author has done some research and has inelegantly fit that information into the story.
The story is actually three stories - one in England in 1851, one in China in 2098, and one in rural USA in 2008. All three stories are told in the first person and they all sound exactly the same, with the same annoying style of short sentences and sentences without a subject ("So that's why I was in the barn. From morning till night ... I didn't need them anyway. Had built these hives so many times I could do it blindfolded ... I started with the boxes. Cut out slots with the electric saw and pounded the planks together with a rubber hammer."). Despite being told in the first person, neither the narrator in the England story nor the one in the USA story were really actively doing anything - they were both grumpy, disheartened, and unlucky people who didn't do much and barely appreciated their family (and both of them had children far more active and interesting than themselves). In the China story, the narrator was more active, and as a result that story was the most interesting of the three, with a plot line that had a tiny bit of a mystery that at least held my interest. However in all three tales, the narrators took the whole book to figure out something that seemed obvious to me from the beginning - there really was almost no narrative tension in the whole book.
While a couple of the side characters where marginally interesting, with the exception of the narrator in the China story, none of the main or side characters were given any motivation for the things they do or the decisions they make. They just abruptly start doing stuff. It was weird.
All the settings were vague and lacked specificity of place. In the China story, the future of our world as imagined by this author didn't really make sense all the time. It's one of those post-apocalyptic stories where people are barely making it to survive and then suddenly there are electric cars, and presumably infrastructure to support that?
I wonder if the book suffered from the translation because there were some very odd passages where it felt like whole sentences or even paragraphs were left out, and there were also strange sentences such as "There was a rustling in the fabric to my right and all of a suddenly they were pulled to one side." They? They what? There is no antecedent even sentences before this one.
argh I would have abandoned this one long ago but I have to lead a discussion on it for work :(...more
The premise and moral discussions are great, and the writing gets the job done just fine, but sometimes the characters and world felt half-ba3? 3 1/2?
The premise and moral discussions are great, and the writing gets the job done just fine, but sometimes the characters and world felt half-baked:
(view spoiler)[1. If there are basically no consequences for any behavior, why does there seem to be pre-immortal rules around sex? like if people can party and indulge in pleasures, why isn't the world more like Brave New World with its soma and its pneumatic pleasures?
2. Related to sex, what are the rules about procreation? If there are Scythes to control the population, does that mean that anyone can have kids whenever? Seems so. If that is the case, then why can't people have sex whenever? Especially if there are no economic limitations?
3. I appreciate that in MidMerica that supposedly people's genetic attributes have blended enough over time that everyone looks mixed. Apparently it has been centuries. But is this true worldwide? How and why? That's a lot of people that would have to move around - and statistically, wouldn't that mean that the dominant geno-and pheno- type would be Asian? And what's up with the genetic categories? How is "Spanic" a dominant worldwide genetic type? What about middle eastern? Or Indo-peninsula?
4. Why does anyone work at all if the Thunderhead manages everything?
5. Are we really meant to believe that Citra and Rowan love each other? This was the weakes part of the novel
6. Still don't understand why suicide is outlawed
7. Do the life-reviving bots really have to be called? What if you are alone in a remote forest and become deadish? How would you be found/revived? (hide spoiler)]...more
Although I felt the writing was uneven, and I'm not sure how long this story will stay with me, I'm glad I read this book. It had some More like 3 1/2
Although I felt the writing was uneven, and I'm not sure how long this story will stay with me, I'm glad I read this book. It had some fun plot turns, and I really think the author shone brightest whenever she wrote about mystical things occurring - this makes a lot of sense after reading her author's note about drawing from her own Aboriginal culture. I really love that she included Animism into the story in such a seamless way. While I was less enamored (no pun intended) by the central romance in the story, along with a not-that-interesting dystopian government/baddie, the sense of place and cultural/natural/spiritual history of the protagonists was cool and different. I would read more from this author. ...more
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