Sharondblk > Recent Status Updates

This feels so young adult.
We're 15% through and Tom works in his parents store. Doing what? What does it sell? What does he do? Does he hate it because it's for his parents, who he seems to hate? So protected.

Why is this book, which starts in New Jersey, with a bunch of New Jersey kids, narrated by a Canadian? Like, obviously Canadian.

From about half way, this feels like the author has tried to wrap the plot around a Wikipedia article. The 'characters' are more like characters. This either had to be about domestic matters, or about war and affairs of state, but they are tied together in an uncomfortably artificial manner.

Two timelines both in present tense. Why? The 'current' timeline is quite wooden. Ava is currently walking around various European cities, hoping to understand her ancestor through the absorption method and repeating stereotypes.
There is weirdness. No one from Sydney offers to pop over to Paris to join someone for a weekend.

This is not one of those technical film books. It's about feelings and stuff. It's got a heavy focus on queerness, and a scoop of the authors relationship with the film. I wish they would write a memoir.

So, the premise is that the Naysayers, from Naysayers Inc in Naysayer land are following people around the Real World with tiny invisible drones, but cannot keep monitoring when people are getting intimate. Because of privacy I guess? This makes no sense, financially or (im)morally.

I'm having trouble going with the premise here. How does heavy duty monitoring of individuals make a profit?

I never believed in the premise of this book, which makes the rest of it more of a though experiment than a novel.

I'm really struggling. They work at Naysayer Inc and live in Naysayer land and monitor the Real World. Out main character starts at the top because nepotism and doesn't have to learn the job because genetics. It's very blunt. It might be deliberate satire, I really can't tell.

I'm taking a little break from this. It should be really interesting, but it's got 2 first person POV. Ruth is living in Sydney in 1999 and remembering what was happening in 1933 Germany and Toller who is in New York and London. current Ruth also has Toller's writing. It jumps around in a manner I find exhausting.

I'm really enjoying the second half a lot more than the first half. It goes from a bunch of people who I can't see why they are friends, to them not being friends!

SO MUCH TELLING. The showing is all just a group of unpleasant friends being unpleasant to each other.

This moves backwards and forwards through time in a weird jerky way.

This is a bit dull and repetitious. The young adults in the book are very ordinary. I'm getting bored.

Weirdly the previous book I read was also romance /family drama with a focus on honesty. Also weird the protagonist of that book was called Barbara.

The similes in this are cliqued.

If you removed all the repetitious commentary from the narrator this book would be both quicker and better.

The structure of this book is not to my liking. It's not dual timeline, it just moves backwards and forwards. At one point I thought my phone must have been playing to itself, and I'd missed a chapter, but no, it was just leaping around in time.
Everyone in this book (except Jack) is pretty horrible.

Turned into a weird lecture from the future about AI.
I think its trying to ask 'what does it mean to be human'. The only answer the book gives me is 'who cares'.
I'm so bored.

This has individual chapters, all in first person with people telling their stories over 1000s of years. It's exhausting.

SO MUCH EXPLAIJNING ABOUT WHAT HELEN THINKS

There are very detailed scenes and then endless mind ramblings from a miserable looser. I'm really not enjoying this.

Helen is one dimensional. She wants to be a writer.
Cherry is one dimensional. She is quirky.

Their friendship is one dimensional. We hear again and again that Cherry is Helens best friend, but Helen thinks she's better than everyone so...

Helen is (allegedly) so socially awkward that she needs a diagnoses. This is quite a drag.

Helen is awkward. She is the most awkward person ever born. She has no friends. She is awkward. We know this because we are told this every paragraph.

This is very two dimensional. There is a great deal of detail about specific things - like the 6 people who attend one workshop - while everything else is very vague. There are hundreds of other people.
Some details just read wrong. They are at a crowded party, with a patio and a hot tub, and only the two main characters are outside

If I'm going to spend this much time in the main characters head, this could be better in first person.

This book does a lot of showing, directly followed by explaining that to the listener. At one point our omniscient narrator states that Helen's decisions are reactive, and spends a paragraph explaining how that works in literary theory.
At 20 % I'm in the middle of a writing workshop. This is not a book in a rush. I'm unclear whether it's meant to be satire.

I don't know how a book this short can be repetitive, but there you have it.

I feel like I am missing a lot through my own ignorance. this book is translated from Spanish, and some words are left in the original language, which I assume is an original (ethnic? First nations? I don't even know the correct term), but I don't know if I, the reader, are expected to know these words or not.