Moxyland

Review in one sentence: This is a good book, but I couldn't connect to it and therefore didn't like it. You may react differently.

I only finished the book because it (mostly) fits the genre I am currently "researching". For me a book needs to deliver on four nearly equally important things. Character. Plot. Setting. Writing Style/Execution.

The writing was tight, with a bit different usage of words probably due to the author being from South Africa. I enjoyed that. However there was something else in the execution that irritated me. There are several different viewpoints and they are all written in first person. It seems that is "not my thing". It wasn't done badly, but I couldn't wrap my head around it.

Which leads me to character. There were I believe four viewpoints: Toby, Tendeka, Kendra and Lerato. They seem to each live their own story, which intersect only occasionally. In the end I couldn't identify with any of them. They were all well fleshed out, actual characters with weaknesses and all that. But for some reason I, despite or maybe because of the first person perspective, I stood next to them watching them go to their doom but I didn't like any of them enough to feel much about it.

The best was the world. Not extremely revolutionary ideas here. We're in a near future where some kind of epidemic has disrupted society as we know it. People either work for large corporations or they belong to the dregs of society with a bare minimum existence. Lerato, working for a big corp, even calls the others 'civilians'. Technology has advanced a bit but not very much - I kept waiting for Kendras Nano Treatment to become the focus of the story.. However the justice system has changed: the standard kind of punishment is a disconnect. I liked that.

The plot was the weakest part of the whole book. I think it was too ambitious to have these four disconnected people tell a coherent story. And it wasn't coherent. They live their own lives, meet sometimes. Most of the plot was spent showing the ways things have changed. In the very last quarter of the book something like a final coalescing begins to happen. It's dark and doesn't end well for nearly all of them. The end fits the book, with only Toby walking away from it all mostly unscathed.

So most of the elements of this book were done well. But they didn't make it into a whole that I was able to enjoy. I had to force myself to read this book. It came with recommendations from Writing Excuses and fit into my wanting to read Cyberpunk-ish books. If you're into modern/post- Cyberpunk and don't mind the mosaic type plot or unsympathetic characters, this might be for you.