**Spoilerific**
I don’t leave books unfinished. Well maybe once (looking at you, How To Do Nothing).
26 pages of Cannonball reviews and only one DNF… Until now.
Now, a few facts:
- I absolutely loved Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’ trilogy. It was expansive and emotional and deep and scary.
- I started reading this book in June.
- I slowly and tortuously made it 90% of the way through this book before giving it in last night.
This book… this damned book. It has sucked the life out of me. I am broken… it’s taken the joy of reading and made it a chore.
So it’s about a guy, Proctor. He has no discernable personality or character traits. He’s just a dude. He’s good at some stuff. He has a wife. He has an affair. He does something vaguely mysterious with putting old folks on a ferry and sending them somewhere for a job.
He lives in a town full of ‘properans’ where everyone is well off, no one has children, instead they go pick up their ‘wards’ from the ferry if they want to have a kid. The town’s pretty boring generally. Things very tightly controlled.
Then there’s a town of service workers who live in the ‘annex’. They keep things running smoothly for the properans.
Proctor takes his elderly father to the ferry and his dad says the word ‘Oranios’ and Proctor’s like ‘what’s that?’ and then a bunch of stuff happens (random storms, secret meetings of a group called the Arrivalists) and then it turns out… IT’S ALL A DREAM. Everyone’s actually on a space ship, having left a climate-change ravaged earth and gone in search of new lands. And so everyone’s in hypersleep and the whole town/annex/ferry business is because Proctor’s real life wife is hosting a big ol’ party dream and everyone’s invited. And there’s a tragic story of Proctor’s real life child dying which causes some fuckery.
I should care about this. This kind of sci-fi stuff is my jam. But I suffered through 90% of this book and I cannot make it any further. I just don’t care about these characters (particularly Proctor), the ‘mystery’, any of it. I found the story telling really confusing, jumping between the space craft and the dream world back and forth with no clarity.
So I’m giving up. I’m moving on.
Other’s may love this book, so don’t take my word on it. Just wasn’t a fit for me.
1 drone attack out of 5.
