Tag: espionage

Review: The Heart Goes Last

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Content warning: major spoilers near the end of the review!

Heart-Goes-Last_Atwood-2I usually really enjoy Margaret Atwood books, but this one left me feeling a little dissatisfied. The premise itself is very interesting. It’s a dystopian near future, where there’s been a horrible economic downturn and large cities are now ghost towns of vigilante youths and people living in their cars. The book follows Charmaine and Stan, a former middle class married couple that are running out of money and options. Charmaine works at a dirty diner/brothel and sees a commercial for an experimental community that offers jobs and security to everyone it accepts. So they sign up for Positron and Consilience – a duel community where residents live half the month in an actual prison and the other half in the adjacent community.

The plot begins to get sinister from there, where there are red hot affairs, spies, executions, and lifelike sex robots. And many Elvis impersonators, but yeah. It would take a long time to really detail all the plot because it is quite intricate. Atwood interweaves the perspectives of both Charmaine and Stan as different chapters throughout the book, and even if the audio book wasn’t narrated by both genders, I think it would be easy to follow along. They each have a unique voice and temperament, which comes across in their chapters. She also only gives the reader the same information that each character actually has, so as you are unfolding the story there is a layer of suspense as you don’t really know what’s happening.

So, yes, this book is masterfully crafted, as many of Atwood’s books are. But it just doesn’t deliver the same punch that many of the other books of hers that I’ve read have. A large part of that is the operation that Charmaine may or may not have undergone. When I believed she had, it felt icky. When it is revealed at the very end that she hadn’t, I just felt cold. I think particularly the reaction of Stan was unsettling. He is practically misogynist, and he is supposed to be the hero of this story. Well, not even practically – he is. He has several rape fantasies towards Charmaine and other women, and even when he believes that Charmaine is his willing (albeit lobotomized) sex slave, he is unhappy about it. He treats Charmaine like dirt, and is surprised that she had an affair and also “killed” him. For all of the book’s social commentary about the treatment of women, it doesn’t do a lot to propose an alternative.

I went back and forth on the rating for this book. It is definitely well-written, engaging, and thought-provoking. All good things that I look for in a novel. But that ending – and really, the final few chapters – brought it all down for me. It turns out that the book is divided into 5 parts, and each had been released over time through a service called Byliner. That service recently shut down, and so Atwood decided to release the book as a legitimate release, with the final 5th part included for the first time. It does make sense, then, why that ending feels really disjointed with the rest of the story. In the end, I decided not to weigh too heavily on the final chapters, but it definitely still colored how I feel in total.

3 stars

This book fulfills the book published this year requirement for the challenge.

Review: Betrayed

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I tend to avoid Christian fiction because it is generally very poor. I’m not the only person that feels this way, there’s a bunch of articles on sites like Christianity Today that also lament this. A lot of the reasons they give are things I noticed in this book.

First, the writing itself is pretty bad. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if this was the first draft of the book. There are sentences that don’t make any sense. I had to read entire paragraphs multiple times just to understand them because the phrasing wasn’t clear. It shouldn’t take this much work to follow a plot. I was constantly rearranging things in a way that sounded better in my head, instead of reading the story. It was also hard to be really invested in the story because there was a lot of filler. About 100 pages could have been cut from this story, easily. I also don’t like stories that misdirect so clumsily. There was a lot of “and then the tall sinister man laughed maniacally behind the scenes.” Well, not literally, but it was certainly very mustache-twirly.

The heroine was also really ridiculous. I kept wanting to smack her in the face. She was unrealistically naive, especially when she rails about her sister being the naive one. She was almost worse! She ran from man to man, continually being betrayed by them, and then would turn tail and run to the next man. I could tell who the “bad” man was from the very beginning, and near the end it was pathetic how the “bad” man would swear and be unbelieving in God while the “good” man was Christian and had Christian faith (and no cussing or innuendos!). You can always tell who the good people in a Christian novel are because they are always talking about faith.

Speaking of faith, that part of the story was really shoe-horned in. Are there guidelines with Christian fiction with how much Bible they need to add to the story for a Christian publisher (this book was published by Tyndale, a pretty big one) to accept it? It really wasn’t relevant for the characters to go on and on about different Bible stories. I was trying to think about books that had Jewish characters, or just other religions, and I never remember it being so inorganic. I’ve actually read a lot of stories with Jewish characters and it never feels like I’ve been beaten over the head with it.

Another bummer about the book was that there were too many characters with no personality. It was hard to keep everyone straight because it was a lot of faceless people. Ironically, the character most full of life was the one killed off at the very beginning of the book. It was easy to get an idea of how she was, how she reacted to things, and what her “off screen” activities might have been. Everyone else was either Good or Bad.

There was a lot of promise in this story. The bones of it were very interesting, and it would have been even better if the good and bad male lead characters had been reversed. That would have been a twist that I wouldn’t have seen coming and would have been interesting. It would have benefited from a lot of editing. I also felt like the stakes in the book were over-hyped so much that when we finally got to it, it was a bit of a disappointment.

Despite all of the things that didn’t work for me about this book, the ending was actually pretty great. And by ending, I don’t mean the part where Vicki hooks up with Mr. Studly Good Man, but the final two or three paragraphs where we get a tag of what happens to Mr. Sinister Bad Man. THAT was excellent, and I had originally rated the book 3 stars just on the basis of that ending, until I began really thinking about it and realized it really deserved a two.

2 stars.

This book fulfills the book your mom loves and book with a love triangle requirements for the challenge.