Jo

Second Scalzi book since Lock In, and I enjoyed it. It's different, lighthearted, interesting, amusing.

Yeah this is going to be full of spoilers but I'm going to put my thoughts here, because why not.

I didn't identify with Daphne at all. She comes from a family that doesn't know want, need, or dysfunction that hurts you.

I identified with Simon, and I felt weird watching his problems get minimized(with author choice, because he wasn't actually raised by his father much) and then swept under the rug, there's very little focus on him healing so much as him sweeping aside his trauma to give Daphne what she wanted.

I'm not going to say the book is bad, I'm giving it a 5 star review because it's a cute romance book outside of the parts that triggered me deeply–I don't want children, and as a woman it would be horrifying to go through a situation like this–where I marry someone telling him I don't want to have kids, that I have really hard pregnancies, only for him to force me into having kids for him, despite how awful the pregnancies are. Starting the marriage knowing that I would struggle to parent knowing my father is much like Simon's Father, only he didn't send me away and I had to deal with him every day.

I don't think this is series is for me, I guess I am glad I read about it and wish it dealt more directly with Simon's trauma rather than narratively minimizing it.

So Lindsey Ellis mentioned this on stream, and I've been meaning to read John Scalzi's books, so this was literally my first, but she mentioned the Threeps and disability and capitalism and I was like “SOLD” and got ahold of this book not long after. It's a good book, and she was right, Scalzi has a light sort of writing. The book flies along, it's like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of adult or scifi books that feel...like an emotionally trying situation. This has emotions to it, but nobody is like, intensely tortured or abused, it's not an intense amount of focus on suffering. We also have a disabled cyborg protagonist. He's a good guy, which is also nice, none of this tortured violent antihero stuff in other books.

As far as the actual plot–it's a detective story, about the system that has risen up around this intensely dangerous and traumatizing disease that affected people of all ages, genders and social classes. It highlights the difference between people who were minimally and maximally effected by the disease, known as Haden Syndrome.

This was alright, I kind of felt like the ending was rushed. It was an ending I was expecting, at least.