Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

On the surface, Jason Pargin's Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia could be written off as another semi-futuristic funny dystopia. It certainly seems as if his book doesn't take itself too seriously. However, what is unique about Jason Pargin's writing, I include the entire “Zoey Ashe” and “John Dies at the End” series, is that Pargin is a brilliant satirist. You should take his work seriously because his slicing, biting wit and take on today's politics and popular culture are interesting and often painfully accurate. He is in good company with Hunter S. Thompson, Catch 22, and “Transmetroplitan.” I could see him and Spider Jerusalem having a lot to say to each other right before Spider loses his shit and pulls out his Spider Jerusalem bowel disruptor on the annoying people in the restaurant.

As a side note - I would love to know if that gun got a nod in this novel in the form of an umbrella.

“That guy is a turd in my teeth.”
― Jason Pargin, Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

Zoey is to Drunk for this Dystopia, is the third in the Zoey series following Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick. If you are unfamiliar with Pargin's work, the basic premise of the “Zoey Ashe” series is that Zoey is a reluctant and farcical heiress to a fortune built on dirty money. Her absent father, who recently passed, was a kingpin in Tabula Ra$a, and his fortune was left to a very ordinary Zoey, much to her surprise. All of a sudden, people are trying to kill her. She has a team that works to protect her, and her choices of what to do with her father's wealth have a massive impact on the people of Tabula Ra$a.

In this book, Tabula Ra$a is hosting its huge annual music festival in the desert, with history's most ridiculous mayoral election in the background. It is a battle of perceptions between the candidates. “As tensions ratchet tighter, Zoey realizes that this is a battle of narratives: Every culture needs a collective story to believe in, so it's just a matter of coming up with one and then carefully sculpting reality to make it fit. How hard can that be? They have the whole weekend.”

“Where you find demand, you find people willing to fill that demand.”
― Jason Pargin, Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

Pargin touches on issues that impact everyday life—fronted by the absurd. For instance, Tabula Ra$a is a city in the middle of the Utah desert. The irony here is that Utah is one of the most conservative states, and Tabula Ra$a... isn't. Zoey's world is the excesses of anything goes, but she is shackled by what she can do by celebrity. Everything said and done is recorded and broadcast on various social networks. Everyone has an angle and an ache to get a finger in the Tabula Ra$a pie. The narrative of what is true and what is a lie is constantly changing and shaped by the viewers' perception—this becomes stochastic terrorism. Perceptions are wielded like a cudgel. Politics aside, stochastic terrorism is a very effective and prevalent threat used widely by both the media in general and media personalities in the real world, and it is matched to the absurd degree in Zoey's world.

The writing is thoroughly engaging. Party in the desert that sounds a lot like burning man to the nth degree, riots, stunts, drugs, sex, danger, action, buildings blowing up, angels set afire...there is a lot to digest here.
This book has some harrowing scenes, one with a fake sinking ship, one with an artificial meat product, and one with a moving drink machine.

It is strange even to put these words together, harrowing and synthetic meat products, but it is true.

Even with this being the third book in the series, it is still one of my best reads of the year. I enjoy the characters. Zoey is entertaining and a lot more complicated than you would initially think. As the series progresses, we learn more about Zoey's team, who they are, and where they come from.

I can't say more about the plot because I don't want to give it away, and even if I could, it is so unbelievable that it is hard to explain. Just trust me. Please don't miss this series! His novels are truly worth the read.

When one goes on (an actual, non-camping) vacation and goes into a famous bookstore, one doesn't want to buy all the stuff one already has on their TBR. (Just me? Okay.) And so after picking out two other books (one of which I was never going to get from the library on time for book club, and one in my preferred genre, romance), I started wandering around aimlessly in search of something that caught my eye. Well, this cover features my favorite color (the hottest pink imaginable), the title was funny, and I flipped to the middle and started reading and it was entertaining enough that I was cool with buying and reading it immediately. As a vacation book, this is the exact opposite vibe of Cold Sassy Tree. It is fast-paced verging on breakneck. There is no shortage of plot. It did not matter one bit that this was the third book in the series and that I had never heard of this author or series before. It is slightly futuristic, and absurd, but not so absurd that you don't recognize this reality. It did its job. I snort-laughed a few times.The downside is that I'm hard-pressed to remember all the plot points - I just re-read the description and was like, “there was a crime? Oh RIGHT, there WAS a crime...” and the mayoral election is played up in a lot of ways that resemble a national one, and also one of the candidates was a thinly veiled caricature of That Guy Who Was Our Most Recent Past-President, and that made the election stuff less fun, even if it was still well-written.CW for the stuff I can remember off the top of my head: kidnapping, staging one's own murder, staging other people's murders, MALE GENITALIA BEING LOPPED OFF BY PSYCHOPATHS, people being fed through woodchippers, physical/psychological abuse of sex workers, ridiculous stunts, body-shaming/fat-shaming. It was entertaining, absolutely, but I'm not in a hurry to pick up any of the others in the series. Though apparently it's being adapted for TV and I could maybe be into that, depending on which streamer it lands on.Powell's, in Portland