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dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So I signed up to a 'book a month' thing from a bookshop that chooses books for you recently. This was the first book they sent me. On the surface, it looks like my sort of thing - body-swapping, dystopia, people just trying to be people with new technology. But I really didn't enjoy this. The whole book has a feeling of wanting to exploit shock or doom that it hasn't really earned - there are few explanations given for why the world is the way it is, or even why the body swaps that go wrong do go wrong - beyond a sort of 'all flesh is frail' handwaving. The author seems to believe that pretty much everyone is either a) horny, b) homicidal or c) 100% selfish (or all of the above), and that being swapped into a nice young body will just be seen as an excuse to indulge in all of the above. There are definitely strong ethical dilemmas to be explored at the core of this story - how would the dead react to being alive again for a short period of time, are we truly the same people if we are transplanted into other bodies (especially ones of different race/gender) - but I didn't get the feeling that the author truly wanted to explore these dilemmas, she merely wanted to use them for shock value and then move the plot on with 'well everyone wants to have sex so that's what happens next.' There is also a strange flirting with racism, with a bunch of characters convinced that they're not racist BUT, but no further exploration of that beyond, again, enjoying the shock value of white people in black bodies. And the only truly positive story in the whole thing (I say positive, but you have to run through the accusations of paedophilia, emotional betrayals and sudden death due to unexplained terrorism before you get there) is the one instance where a white woman is put in a white woman's body and so somehow the sex is good not bad. It's all just.... a bit icky, and far too uninterested in properly exploring any of the problems it creates for plot.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Child abuse, Death, Infidelity, Pedophilia, Racism, Self harm, Suicide, Xenophobia, Mass/school shootings