Anna Kravchuk's Reviews > Prophet Song

First of all, the writing style. I couldn't shake off the feeling that what I'm reading is the output of AI which got a movie as an input and was requested to generate a text description of every shot. As a novel it's tiresome to read and this style doesn't add to the content at all. As a writing style experiment it's not exciting enough, you might as well go for "Ducks, Newburyport" instead.

Second, this book is not as much an exploration of the whole idea of a totalitarian state vs private person as it is a rather shameless exploitation of this theme. The characters are flat, the events feel like an amateur imitation of themselves. Here's our evilest evil, here's how we boil a human-frog by slowly increasing the water temperature so it doesn't notice. One platitude after another with no original thought in between.There's no complexity of the behavior or relationships or motivations, the only nuances present are of housekeeping. I mean, if housekeeping is your thing then sure, but if you happen to have read any memories of the Great Terror in the USSR, anything about the Nazi period in Germany, 1984 at least, then I'm afraid you'll find yourself yawning and at difficulty to care or believe this.