Happy New Year!
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A thrilling read from start to finish, this near-future dystopia is Hunger Games for grown-ups, with plenty of racial justice politics thrown in. The plot, in which the masses of incarcerated are invited to participate in gladiatorial battles to the death for the slavering live and video mass audience, seems close enough to reality that it does not really shock. And presumably that is Adjei-Brenyah's point. The main characters are appealing and well-drawn, even if some of the parallel plots are underdeveloped. Occasional informational footnotes are well intended but seem gratuitous to me.
I can't say I thought the novel was good enough to make the NYT Top 10 list, which it did, but then again I have not read much of the competition, so perhaps I should withhold judgment. The ending is satisfying and abrupt, and leaves enough hanging that a sequel seems inevitable... perhaps after a movie adaptation, which would probably be a blockbuster and would render its viewers as complicitous in the spectacle and the atrocity as the book does its readers.
Every Day is Mother's Day
Hilary Mantel
This was Mantel's first novel– a nasty piece of dark comedy, in the mode of Muriel Spark. Indeed, one of the main characters is a mentally challenged young woman named Muriel, perhaps in homage. Mantel was already very good, but not yet at the top of her game compared with triumphs like Fludd, let alone the Wolf Hall trilogy. Read this one when you are in the mood for some misanthropy.
The New Animals
Pip Adam
Set in the fashion scene of Auckland, NZ, The New Animals meanders through a few hours in the lives of its not very interesting characters before taking a rather bizarre and unexpected turn in its last quarter. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I am pretty certain that I will not re-read it to figure it out. Your mileage may vary!
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