Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (Zoey Ashe #3)

by Jason Pargin

Harmonia faced Zoey. “Take me to the extraction room, or this man dies.” Zoey looked to Will. She prided herself on not having to rely on him in situations like this or, really, any other. But he still had far, far more experience than she did in this kind of thing. There was a long pause while Will looked back and forth from Harmonia to the man she was holding hostage with her butterflies and then to Wu, who seemed poised to cut the woman down if some kind of resolution could not be reached in the next five seconds or so.

I'm already bored with this contrivance. Her team has allowed all this to get to this point...why exactly? For the "jokes"?

“The issue,” said Wu, making a clear effort to keep his voice even, “isn’t the woman’s physical presence at the building, but that we somehow had no intel about her plan. This was an orchestrated stunt. Did this fanatic’s followers really not know in advance the broadcast was coming? And if her fans did know, how did we not know?”

That's the issue? I'd say the issue is she wasn't immediately tackled and restrained.

We’re trying not to advertise the fact that those other workers lost their jobs.” “Why didn’t we just, you know, not fire them?” “If you want new world-saving tech to be cost-competitive enough for adoption, this is how it happens.

Sigh. I think I'm officially over Pargin using contrived conflicts to explain social theory to me. I'd rather read a compelling story with interesting characters and these individuals are the exact same mouthpieces they've been since book one. Zoey has changed not at all and it makes her impossible to care about.

Did you drag me out here just so you could dump your Theory of Everything on me?

This describes most of Pargin's books.

“I don’t know, but I bet even back in olden times, those mousey religious housewives were more scared of their neighbors than God. Who knows what they were like behind closed doors. But you know, when people talk about how they wish they could live in the past, when they fantasize about the knights and castles era or the Old West, I think that’s what they’re wishing for, to be rid of that pressure. They’d be willing to give up modern medicine and clean water for a chance to be free of all of this, the nonstop performance that comes with knowing everything you do, day and night, is for an audience.”

This book is a series of social lectures thinnly connected by an uncompelling "plot" that still has yet to go past Act One.

“You should try knowing him personally, it’s even weirder. Imagine trying to shop for his Christmas gift.” “Is that a thing you actually do for each other? Are you close friends?” “Why do I get the sense that’s not the question you’re really asking?”

Zoey's conversational style is so oblique and antagonistic that it's tedious and exhausting. How about one nonsarcastic moment of sincerity?

Whatever the thinking is behind the hoax, the big thing is that these women were in fact taken out of society and their loved ones are very worried about them.”

I'm predicting the women are in on it.

“To be clear, in the picture you’re trying to create in my brain, the woman isn’t white, is she?

Wow. Look who made it about race? I was picturing a white woman. Guess Zoey is dialed into being racist or finding racism wherever she can.

“I’m just saying, we’re all just people, and sometimes our actions make no sense because we’re fightin’ a battle with needs we don’t like or understand. If you’re ever wondering how a man feels about you, remember that what he feels and what he wants to feel might be two different things.”

Insights like this would hit harder and more profoundly if they were part of the narrative thread and not awkwardly shoehorned into convos that aren't even germane to them.

It’s her. I talked to her. She cut her hair but it’s her. I don’t know why she’s here but she’s preparing to do something,

Called it.