An entertaining sendup of millennials’ folkways and the digital rabbit holes they might plunge into.
Teenagers dive into—and rebel against—a brave new world of virtual reality in this satire.
This lightly dystopian yarn imagines a near-future Sherman Oaks, California, where a self-conscious, post-Millennial generation of adolescents experiences everything from schooling to dating to fantasy wrestling matches with Godzilla in immersive VR. Teens rarely leave the swivel chairs and “velmets” in their bedroom VR pods, and social hierarchies separate “on-sync” cool kids from “non-sync” losers based on the fashionableness of the “virskin” avatars they design. Bullied for attending his high school Virskin Ball in an intentionally hideous virskin of mutilated body parts and a bearded baby head, 15-year-old Brix Leveque seeks vengeance by redoing his avatar as a ninja warrior complete with well-honed virtual fighting moves. He trains a misfit army of “Bleeding Heart Ninjas” to stage attacks on pillars of the VR world. Even more subversive is Divya Sinha, who was raised by a flawless virtual simulation of her dead mother, Carol, that the VR corporation Reincarnate crafted from the woman’s diaries and social media footprint. In homage to Carol, Divya has started an “Organic People” movement that tries to wean kids from VR (hardcore devotees unplug from their pods for up to one hour each day) and reveres icons of the previous millennial generation like an older Justin Bieber, who is now worshipped as the Millennial Prophet. When Divya starts recruiting Brix’s Bleeding Heart followers, he leaves his ninja adventures and hauls his pasty, flabby body into the alien dimension of the real world to challenge her—and possibly start a romance.
Books’ speculations on a VR–saturated future sometimes hit false notes—real teens would find Brix’s baby Frankenstein virskin way cooler than his ninja persona. But the author’s conjectures do capture unsettling aspects of how digital life is supplanting a real world that seems increasingly flat and boring by comparison while poking well-aimed fun at the callow grandiosity of kids caught up in online fantasias. (“When Brix finished the 10-minute course, he felt like he knew the entire history of ninjas.”) The raucous story shines less as a forecast about a post-Millennial generation than as a spoof of the ridiculousness of the present-day millennial generation, embodied by arch-millennial Bieber, a tornado of self-obsession and melodrama about nothing as he recalls the trauma of receiving mean tweets. It’s an upfront novel of ideas, with writing that tends toward a sociology seminar—“Are you saying that the virtual world is a benevolent class system where people should accept their place in the hierarchy for the sake of larger harmony?”—and characters who sometimes feel as if they are there to make a point rather than live their lives. Fortunately, the tale is also full of pitch-perfect put-downs of everything from millennials’ narcissism—perusing Carol’s digital archive, “Divya adored the selfies, endless mosaics of the face, filtered and augmented to mimic what teenage Carol considered ideal Millennial beauty: duck-face, the left shoulder slightly tilted”—to their vacuous rectitude. (“If only she were a Millennial!” muses Divya. “They had character. When young, they stood for principles like ‘disruption,’ ‘monetization,’ ‘start-up,’ and ‘swiping.’ ”) The result is a smart, funny take on readers’ love affair with technology.
An entertaining sendup of millennials’ folkways and the digital rabbit holes they might plunge into.Pub Date: June 13, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Graffiti Books
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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