Mike’s Reviews > Hungry > Status Update

That was around 20 different twists in the last 30 pages or so, and I'm totally lost. I have legitimately never been so baffled by a book in my entire life. What is Swain trying to say? I think Gaia's society was supposed to be an analogue for authoritarian communism, but how does that add to the themes?

Also, we are nowhere close to a natural resolution. How can Swain end this in literally twelve pages?

I'm not sure if I can even properly rant about how jarring the shift in tone is. Even more than the tone change, it's just a baffling writing decision. What could this story possibly gain from introducing a totally new world in the last hundred pages!? What purpose does this serve? How does this add to the themes? Not only does this fail, I'm at a complete loss as to what Swain was going for.

Well. This is bizarre. No, seriously, this section wasn’t at all set up by anything in the previous 300 pages, and it’s totally at odds with the tone of the book. It also kills the tension and brings the dramatic structure to a sputtering halt. It’s like I hit a wormhole and got transported to a totally different novel. This is one of the most aggressively incompetent books I’ve ever read.

I'll say this: there are some good ideas in this book. The idea of a dystopia with no food is extremely gimmicky, but a story about the privatization of resources, with a privileged narrator who thinks she's rebellious but actually isn't... those had potential. This didn't have to be terrible. But the execution ruins those good concepts at almost every level imaginable.

I thought maybe Thalia would get some sort of arc involving facing consequences and responsibility for her privilege. But no, Basil didn't actually mean anything he said in his rant. She loses nothing for her flaws, and everything she does is easy. I hate this book.

Also, this dialogue is TERRIBLE. Nobody talks like this.

This is so didactic. Swain doesn't trust us to infer the message, she has Basil say everything outright. It's obnoxious and amateurish.

Also, the pacing is so rushed. The character motivations and stakes change too quickly for us to get any feeling of suspense and tension - sections rush by before we get a chance to fully appreciate them.

When we got to the rehab facility, I thought, "Finally, this might be interesting." But no, less than ten pages later, Thalia was rescued by the boring love interest. Our impression of the place was rushed; I think Swain wanted to build up mystery for some later reveals, but the setup is just awkward and confusing.

Also, Thalia has no character arc and she's annoyingly perfect and the writing still sucks.

Swain lifts the idea of pills that regulate emotions from The Giver, and adds that they also regulate hunger. But The Giver is about proving that people need emotions, even the bad ones - Swain takes it for granted, which is a huge mistake. It's the reason everybody makes fun of this premise, and that I don't buy that this world is worse than ours.

Also, Thalia is flawless and inhuman and the writing is awful.

Large portions of the worldbuilding - particularly the malls and the classrooms - are lifted directly from Jennifer Government. I already disliked that book, and Swain uses the same conceits to even worse effect.

Also, this is legitimately bothering me: why does hearing the names of food Thalia has never seen trigger hunger in her? Why does she just innately know what chicken is? That's now how brains work!

Swain has yet to convince me that this world isn't VASTLY better than the real one. Who cares if the pleasure of food is gone? Starvation has been ended, and almost everyone is in extremely good health! And I don't see at all how interactions on the InterWeb are supposed to be fake, mainly because Swain doesn't show us these interactions at all. (It's the same basic mistake that Fahrenheit 451 made.)