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What's the age appropriateness of this book? Details of why would be appreciated!

Allan The central theme of this novel is arranged adulthood. The protagonist is sheltered within a cossetted, compartmentalized, need-to-know society until …moreThe central theme of this novel is arranged adulthood. The protagonist is sheltered within a cossetted, compartmentalized, need-to-know society until suddenly he comes of age, with both a career track and a marriage to leap into with both arranged feet.

The narrative style begins local and myopic. Extremely myopic. Dear diary: Sam-I-Am. Adult themes are pushed to the narrative sidelines, while simultaneously acting as the primary character motive. Few 12-year-olds will be able to situate the sidelines, especially given the episodic and tersely codified "adult" interactions, between characters who haven't yet figured out "adult" themselves yet. What I noticed on reading this book last night is that the spartan introduction has some parallel elements with David Lean's Dr Zhivago. Where's Waldo in this case is an APB on Pavel Pavlovich "Pasha" Antipov, had the screenplay been developed by John Wyndham. This is the kind of narrative tensor metric that gives this book its "trippy" character.

Maybe by age 15 some of this will make a bit more sense. But many SF enthusiasts at that age fail to notice something wrong when the inaugural bridge crew of the 2009 Star Trek reboot—not a cosmic garbage scow, but a fleet flagship—failed to include a single person over the age of 23, give or take. Adulthood 101, hold-my-beer edition of the Star Trek franchise.

Perhaps a serious SF reader by the age of 16 would be sufficiently attuned to the peculiar rifts in this particular narrative universe.

However, the actual filter you need is unlikely to exist to any great resolution before the age of 25, around the time that the human brain finishes fleshing out its primary wiring plan. That's the age where negative space begins to develop: the ability to see the thing as much for what it's not doing, as for what it is doing. This "inverted" world is all about negative space. If you don't notice that the narrative conventions are as badly messed up as the strange physics, you're missing most of the point of the entire exercise.

Probably the best plan is a first read at 15, a second read at 25, and a third read in your fifties.

When I was 15, I already understood I was pre-reading some difficult books that would require a proper read later on with more maturity under my chin. An early YA reader with no visceral sense of anything wrong with the Star Trek reboot film from 2009, who has never noticed the difference between pre-reading and reading, isn't going to get much out of this one in my opinion.

Part of the problem is that the difficulty of this book is not obvious from the prose style. The prose seems simple. Sometimes too simple. That's your first clue. There's no direct train to this twisted galactic quadrant from platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station, for a child who considers that kind of thing standard fare.
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