Alexandra Kleeman

Possibly even better than her debut You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, this uses the same haunting language to analyze modern life (which, like her first book, is distorted into a satirical sci-fi near-future full of disturbing trends) and the decay of humanity and nature due to capitalist consumerism.

In this story [minor spoilers ahead] the droughts on America's west coast have lead to the creation of WAT-R, a synthesized version of water with disturbing properties (it doesn't move or act like water or often really like any actual worldly fluid) that is sold back to the populace at constantly inflating prices while the ultra-wealthy hoard real water and profit from their investments in WAT-R. A novelist arrives in LA to find that the screenplay adaptation of his most personal novel has been bastardized into a hackneyed horror story with a washed up starlet attached. From there things get simultaneously deep and disturbing and funny and touching. My main complaint was that it felt like after a really methodical and in-depth build up, it started to race toward the ending, although maybe this was a stylistic choice given the subject matter of worlds accelerating toward a chaotic ending, so I will let it slide.… (meer)

Strange book. 65% of it was really good, but the rest of it was just high-fallutine filler. The last 50 pages were simply skimable. The main nut of the story was really good, but the author didn’t seem to know where to go with it. A lot of side meaningless characters. If she had stuck with Cassidy and Patrick and the water mystery, it could have been tight. A sub plot about the wife’s climate crisis angst might have worked then. The writing is good. But too many words that don’t amount to very much.… (meer)

some good stuff, but overall too ambitious, collapses under its own weight. tries to pack in too many themes and does none of them justice. anticlimactic because nothing is properly resolved. i got pissed off towards the end and skimmed the last chapter, which was a good call, because i had completely stopped caring and there was nothing in there to change that.

also, has one of my least favourite tropes in it - psychic nine year old with an eerily adult manner of speaking. i mean, come on.… (meer)