Circle of Desire
Ratings185
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings185
Average rating3.3
"As the top assassin at The Circle, a shadowy group of mercenaries, Olivia St. Vincent can hunt down anyone. She's been trained since she was a teenager to kill without feeling, to interact with men without love. But when she's kidnapped by the enigmatic leader of a rival organization, she learns she's been lied to for years. She never worked for the good guys. Collin Ryker believes the sultry woman he's abducted knows more than she's telling about The Circle and its plans for complete domination. Over time, as they work together, Olivia's tenacity and vulnerability captivate him. But if he isn't careful, Collin will fall into the biggest trap of all: caring for a woman who can betray him to his greatest enemy"--Page 4 of cover.
Featured Prompt
2,097 booksWhen you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...
Featured Series
4 primary booksThe Circle is a 4-book series with 4 primary works first released in 1994 with contributions by Carla Swafford, Evelyn Vaughn, and Yvonne Jocks.
Reviews with the most likes.
I would not recommend that anyone hire Dave Eggers as a futurist, or even a present-ist.
The key to good speculative fiction is sustaining an understanding of how humans behave - otherwise it is too far removed from the human experience that it is boring. Dave Eggers fails to do so; in particular, he seems not to know how real life people use the Internet or relate to each other in general. Or if he does, he asks far too much of us in terms of suspending our disbelief. In the first 20 pages, he asks us to believe that society has done away with online trolls and anonymity. Over the course of the next 400, we are to believe that no one (except for two characters, maybe) has ever studied or achieved any level of understanding of sociology, law, political science, or history. Somewhere along the way, the Constitution and rule of law have mysteriously poofed out of existence. It's just too absurd to take seriously. To be fair: it takes until about page 400 for Godwin's law to manifest itself.
Also, I am highly skeptical of his representations about marine ecology but I am less qualified to rant about that.
I can't even get into the gender dynamics.
Not to mention that the speculative technology is not even novel! It's like, 2005 telegraphed and wants its cutting edge technology back, Mr. Eggers.
I wouldn't be so outraged about this book except that I suspect that the people who are currently, in real life, throwing bricks and vomiting on the tech worker commuter buses in the Bay Area seem to have read this book as if it were unadorned fact.
And it is not even well-written. An example I could not resist taking note of: “There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The décor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional.” Wait, Dave, I still don't get it. Can you hit me over the head about it one more time?
It's weird, because I remember his first two books as being really well-written. So, in sum, I like his older stuff better.
A sci-fi story so relevant it could be misconstrued as nonfiction, but it's obvious that Eggers' searing desire to warn his audience about the consequences of an overly connected society upstages his capacity to craft a plot-dense, character-rich narrative.
Look, I kind of get what Dave was trying to do here, and it's very clever but this book just TRIES SO HARD. I don't think it helped that the humour totally went over my head, I think as someone who suffers from anxiety the scenes where Mae is frantically trying to get her ratings up just didn't resonate.l and I just despaired at the deliberately awful sex scenes. The characters veer from Mae being impossibly naive and totally gaslit by the company to her former boyfriend who is annoyingly preachy. I think because we see things so much from Mae's point of view, the other characters are not really developed, and it can be quite easy to become wearied of her constant navel gazing and selfishness, which is hammered home at every opportunity. Instead of allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions, the author puts huge red lights around everything, signs pointing to where to laugh, where to feel shocked and where to marvel at his brilliance. It didn't have to be written in such a simplistic way, give the reader some credit. Honestly, though Infinite Jest is a complex behemoth and DFW is ‘problematic' to put it mildly, it's far more memorable in comparison.
