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A review by rosseroo
Total Oblivion, More or Less by Anya Johanna DeNiro
2.0
This debut novel took me months to finish, I kept picking it up reading ten pages, putting it down, and came close to giving up on it multiple times. By the end, I kind of wish I had, because it never really comes together in any meaningful way. The story has all kinds of imaginative elements, but they're jumbled together so incoherently that they lose all meaning.
At its heart, it's kind of a post-apocalyptic river journey (hard not to think of Twain here), as some kind of space-time rift has occurred and the United States has ceased to exist. Instead there seems to be some kind of empire, and there are Goths and Scythians roaming around, concentration camps, slavery, and a mutant plague, and all technology fails to work. The heroine here is Macy, a regular 16-year-old girl from St. Paul, who is heading downriver with her family (college professor father, sick and pregnant mother, older sister, younger brother). Various calamities befall them, they meet strange people, some of whom are helpful, some not. There are family issues. There's a talking dog.
For me, the whole thing was just kind of a mess. Because I couldn't work out the timeline of what had happened (at some points it sounded like society crumbled a few months ago, but in other parts, it had to a have been at least 5-10 years), nor the geography, nor the players involved. And without that grounding, the mission that Macy eventually undertakes has very little meaning. It's hard to tell if the author just had it all clear in his head and couldn't get it on the page, or if it's deliberately confusing. Either way, I never found a way into caring about Macy or any other characters, and so the book didn't work for me.
At its heart, it's kind of a post-apocalyptic river journey (hard not to think of Twain here), as some kind of space-time rift has occurred and the United States has ceased to exist. Instead there seems to be some kind of empire, and there are Goths and Scythians roaming around, concentration camps, slavery, and a mutant plague, and all technology fails to work. The heroine here is Macy, a regular 16-year-old girl from St. Paul, who is heading downriver with her family (college professor father, sick and pregnant mother, older sister, younger brother). Various calamities befall them, they meet strange people, some of whom are helpful, some not. There are family issues. There's a talking dog.
For me, the whole thing was just kind of a mess. Because I couldn't work out the timeline of what had happened (at some points it sounded like society crumbled a few months ago, but in other parts, it had to a have been at least 5-10 years), nor the geography, nor the players involved. And without that grounding, the mission that Macy eventually undertakes has very little meaning. It's hard to tell if the author just had it all clear in his head and couldn't get it on the page, or if it's deliberately confusing. Either way, I never found a way into caring about Macy or any other characters, and so the book didn't work for me.