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A review by hiimkayte
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum
2.0
This book was really a slog. I've been in a lot of zoom meetings for work where there are one or more side conversations about the meeting that are happening in various slack channels in real time, and it's exhausting and hard to focus even when the side convos are useful or interesting. That's pretty much what I felt about this book. Having characters in multiple bodies in multiple places is a cool concept, but it felt like we were getting side commentary on events as they happened, and rather than add suspense, it just added confusion and made me tired. Read this as an audiobook, it's possible that also added to the confusion, as it wasn't always clear when we'd jump from one body/scene to another.
I was really interested in the begging of the book. I liked the intro to all of Fift's parents, and how catty and fussy they all seemed. It started the book off on a fun light tone, which was a good counterpoint trying to quickly absorb all of the complex (but cool!) world building elements! Also, I've been having a lot of discussions with my daughter on privacy/safety online, and this extreme view of parental monitoring actually made me re-examine some of my views.
There were a lot of good things throughout the book, the world building especially. I get that there was the one big event which was the catalyst for the unraveling, but there was just so much commentary happening during and after that it didn't feel impactful. Also, there were occasional descriptions of what different bodies looked like, but I wasn't able to keep in my head any sort of image of what any of the characters or even settings really looked like, so I didn't feel anchored in place.
I also can't say I was particularly rooting for Fift, or Shria, or their relationship, or their families, or society... so I didn't feel invested watching it unravel.
I was really interested in the begging of the book. I liked the intro to all of Fift's parents, and how catty and fussy they all seemed. It started the book off on a fun light tone, which was a good counterpoint trying to quickly absorb all of the complex (but cool!) world building elements! Also, I've been having a lot of discussions with my daughter on privacy/safety online, and this extreme view of parental monitoring actually made me re-examine some of my views.
There were a lot of good things throughout the book, the world building especially. I get that there was the one big event which was the catalyst for the unraveling, but there was just so much commentary happening during and after that it didn't feel impactful. Also, there were occasional descriptions of what different bodies looked like, but I wasn't able to keep in my head any sort of image of what any of the characters or even settings really looked like, so I didn't feel anchored in place.
I also can't say I was particularly rooting for Fift, or Shria, or their relationship, or their families, or society... so I didn't feel invested watching it unravel.