Review of 'OOF' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Oh My! Oh My! What a book! This was completely unexpected, the cover throws you off big time, it looks like journal that would make for rather dry reading, what you actually get is a scarily accurate portrayal of just how the Internet has broken humanity’s grasp on reality. The Strobe Witherspoon in the book has written a novel, a parody of sorts about a former first lady of the USA, no names are given in the book but it is obvious who this first lady is and the ensuing chaos and outrage from “that President’s” loyal supporters makes the basis for this book (OOF not the one about the first lady). Using some innovative writing techniques we get an outrageous story that couldn’t possibly happen…but if you sit back and think about the state of social media and it’s cancel culture of guilty without needing evidence, this book becomes …
Oh My! Oh My! What a book! This was completely unexpected, the cover throws you off big time, it looks like journal that would make for rather dry reading, what you actually get is a scarily accurate portrayal of just how the Internet has broken humanity’s grasp on reality. The Strobe Witherspoon in the book has written a novel, a parody of sorts about a former first lady of the USA, no names are given in the book but it is obvious who this first lady is and the ensuing chaos and outrage from “that President’s” loyal supporters makes the basis for this book (OOF not the one about the first lady). Using some innovative writing techniques we get an outrageous story that couldn’t possibly happen…but if you sit back and think about the state of social media and it’s cancel culture of guilty without needing evidence, this book becomes a warning, humanity is on a precipice if we don’t stop with being so dumb ALL the time then we’re gonna tip over the edge and armageddon will be our reward.
Strobe uses tweets, podcasts, blogs, interviews and emails to tell the story, you’d think this wouldn’t work but we are trained to read a story from tweets, blogs are structured in a way that flow nicely and are comfortable for readers and podcasts…are just fun, great when they get out of hand. One weird thing about this book is you have a lot of characters but you only really know 4 of them, the rest are just like in real life, a faceless entity behind a computer screen, Strobe has handled these well and you can get a sense of who they are in how they write. The book has many many many good lines, think of those eye catching headlines and the tweets that make you reply with an LOL. My favourite has to be:
“Hysterical is now the new normal”
I certainly get that feeling when I check out the threads when something is trending…that is a quote that deserves to make it onto a T-shirt.
I have really enjoyed this book, it is very clever and leaves the reader unsure of what is real and what is fake news. One sign of just how good this was is by the time I was halfway through I was already recommending this to everybody.
Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/05/22/oof-an-online-outrage-fiesta-for-the-ages-by-strobe-witherspoon/