There are certain books that are always on our periphery. They live at the edges of our consciousness, going “Hey, read me sometime, will ya?” The ones we always think we should get around to, but there’s always something newer and edgier and shiny-er that’s grabbing our attention. For me, one of those books has always been The Handmaid’s Tale, which did dystopia before it was cool. The other night, I gave in and started a 30-day free trial of Kindle Unlimited, just to see if it […]
A dystopian novel that reads like an epic poem. Not sure that’s a compliment, in this case.
My first exposure to Chang-rae Lee was an essay, “Mute in an English-Only World,” found in my Composition reader at my PhD institution. I taught it my first year teaching and realized that it had been taught for the last ten years. I received a suspiciously large amount of papers on the essay, which made me realize there were way too many papers floating around about the essay. So I had to ban it. The essay was not my favorite, either. It was somewhat hard […]
So much wasted potential.
I know we’re experiencing a kind of glut in dystopian fiction these days, but I do honestly enjoy the genre when it’s done well (my go-to examples are still always going to be Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I am teaching this fall and SUPER excited about). I look for other examples by authors I haven’t read, and The Dead Lands was one such text. I’ve never read anything by Benjamin Percy, but one of my Facebook friends […]
Crash!
I finished this book some time ago, but I was so tired of being mad about it that I have put off this review. This a garbage book, ending the series on a low note. Throughout the previous two books, the story was told through the perspective of Tris, the most special snowflake that ever snowflaked in a snowstorm. In this novel, having run the well dry of shallow drama, Roth alternates between Tris’s viewpoint and that of her boyfriend, Four. His personality is not […]