A review by p_t_b
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

2.0

ok so i am working on my energy for 2018 and that energy project mostly means no hate so i will keep this brief

round characters, nice pace, weirdly boring and mid tempo, which i think was deliberate, a frog in boiling water situation. but actually sometimes the blankness is just banality and sometimes the banality is so banal that my fillings hurt. books does well not to get schmaltzy with the migrant aspect, just sort of playing it straight in a way that worked, but then the last quarter of the story just falls apart into a lazy-ass children of men situation and some howlingly bad lines like: "we are all migrants through time" XXXXXXXXXX delete X X xxxx

spiciest take: this book posits romantic love is an appliance/instrument of middle-class status, like good cell phone reception or a job. im not saying the book is wrong necessarily