Reviews and Comments

Beautifully written but minus one star for the narrator knowing his best friend for 80 years but having no idea how he would react to a black daughter-in-law. "It just never came up"? Seriously?

I much prefer this to the original author and story (The Horror at Red Hook by HP Lovecraft)

I wanted to give this more of a shot but there was just too high of a ratio of description-of-FGM to world-building in the first part for me to continue further

Compelling argument but tbh the only way I see half of the Earth being set aside for wildlife is the Chernobyl way

Some sparkling passages and some mystifying narrative choices made for a decidedly mixed impression by the end

The first two-thirds of the book, which was originally conceived to be about the "Republican Civil War," and is built around the author's access to the key GOP congressional players in that drama, serves very well as a narrative of how the party came to bend the knee to Trump. All of the stuff after his inauguration (final third of the book) I knew well enough already.

Explains a lot about the state of our country

These "neo-Confederates" are absolutely MAGA acolytes today, and nothing about their obsessions makes sense without the explanatory variable of racism. Some of the other people he meets are just plain lovely, though, and reading about them makes the whole thing worth it

Bracing. I was glad to breeze through in audio format

The compelling plausibility of her near-future dystopia is sharply contrasted with the laughably un-compelling Earthseed belief system that motivates the main character and which, I think, we are supposed to accept uncritically (why else would she try to make us read all those verses?)

It is timely to learn how recently voting rights became universal, all of the tumult that preceded that, and how easily the trend might turn in a different direction. It is yet another thing none of us should take for granted as we move forward in uncertain times

I'm glad it worked out for her in the end, but it's hard not to think of all the ones for whom it hasn't, or won't