The Windup Girl

It's rare that a book makes you feel unclean when you've finished it, but Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl manages it. How the hell this won so many awards is beyond me. Yes the world building is detailed, extrapolating both climate change and genetically modified foods to their logical ends, but my god it's sloooooow. The author is compared to Gibson, but Gibson is a much better writer, able to write pacy science fiction that brims with ideas and is actually entertaining as well as thought provoking. The Wind Up Girl could easily have lost 150 pages and not suffered.

There is not one likeable character in the whole book (well, maybe one, but he gets killed off halfway through). Everyone else is utterly corrupt, violent, amoral or, like Emiko, the Windup Girl herself, a barely fleshed out character.

But the thing that left a real bad taste is the degrading, overly detailed descriptions of the sexual assaults inflicted upon the titular character at the club she works at. Anal rape with a Champagne bottle anyone? I fucking kid you not. Bacigalupi includes these scenes for what? It certainly adds nothing to her character. It's just gratuitous.

To be honest I had to skip read the last few chapters, I just wanted to get the damn thing finished. Awful, awful book.

I'm going for a shower.