The very most frustrating thing about writing book reviews is not being able to talk about the ending except in vague enough terms that I won't spoil it. It nearly always renders what I say meaningless.
Well, first let me say that I'm not sure that this book really belongs in the dystopian genre, either. There are hints that the government at large doesn't handle the new technologies in quite the right way, nothing more. The major conflict is within a family, a maladjusted, rather scary family.
A girl wakes up from a coma with no memory of who she is. She was involved in some kind of accident that no one will talk about. Her family is behaving strangely. And the things she does remember, don't match what she is being told by her very protective parents.
I thought I knew where this book was headed. Several times I could see it play out in my mind, the next several plot twists. Each time, I was wrong. The author is far more imaginative than I am.
So many questions are raised about identity, about what constitutes a person. I wished for a deeper exploration of these things than the book allows, but the way it addressed the questions was very endearing, even if it was incomplete. I felt a measure of sympathy for every character, even the scary ones, by the end.
Ah, the end. How much will I allow myself to say? The end felt like the author was tired of writing and cobbled together some kind of reasonable conclusion. It was a bit unsatisfactory. I wish she had spent more time and care; I wasn't really ready to leave the characters that soon and with so many of my own questions unanswered.
But I could have lived with it, except for the tiny epilogue at the end.
The ghosts of all my disappointment about the epilogue at the end of Deathly Hallows were resurrected by those two and a quarter pages. I cannot fathom the decision to include those paragraphs at the end of this book. I suppose the author was intending for some kind of closure, but it was the wrong kind entirely. It skipped over too much and still left me with all of my questions. The epilogue should not have been published.
Unsatisfying, ultimately, but not a waste of time. And now I HAVE to read more books, just to get my fill of true dystopia.
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