eggdropsoap > Recent Status Updates

This book is hard to read. It’s not trying to efficiently sweep the reader along; it’s a story about sentences, and demands the reader slow down and personally navigate, appreciate, each one it inspects and that it is made of.

Stood up to a re-reading all these years later much better than the first did.

Still delightfully plotted and structured, and amazing worldbuilding… but I’d forgotten how crudely *vulgar* the book’s characters are, and in where it focuses its narrative lens. And not just the poet. These are people who don’t deserve the stars. And it’s hard to tell whether the book is condemning or revelling in the vulgarity. It takes something away on this second reading nearly 20 years later.

Forgot how good this was since I read it almost two decades ago. Just chapter 1 feels like a whole epic story.

Dated technologically (1992 concepts about future phone systems are key to the plot but wildly inaccurate), and weirdly satirical about British and American culture, to the point of garish parody, but under those rather superficial elements there is a solid, deathly-serious, gripping drama of personal human experience during disaster.

Alright, that’s the prequel done. Let’s see if turning this literal leaf means the book can turn over a new leaf and get better with Peri as the main character. Please, please don’t “she’s a sexy kitten” in limited-omniscient voice again…

Aaaand cue fridging the love interest. 🙄 Jesus.

(And here I was, foolishly hoping I’d get to hear Summer’s story with her own voice instead of Silas constantly projecting for her about what she thought about him and everything.)

A couple of nice tense scenes, but they’re regularly interrupted by Silas being a horndog. Silas is a shitty POV character to be riding along with. Like, it’s not even presented as “being a distracted horndog is Silas’s flaw to overcome”, it’s presented as just normal, like the author isn’t aware it’s weird.

*sigh* This is getting less “cool people doing cool things” and more “cool-ish people who are doing technobabble but WAIT they are also SO SEKSY and check out this explicit foreplay.” Just… crass? Like, Vaseline on the camera lack of subtlety and a clear focus on crafting fantasy material for a male reader. My intent to actually finish this book is quickly dropping, and that takes some doing!

I’m loving the *premise* so far… but I have to say:

What the ever-loving hell is with the constant body-policing? A woman barely appears without an immediate reference to how she shouldn’t be eating what she ordered, or how her figure rates against her peers, or how she should eat a sammich. WT actual F?