In her Author's note at the end of this book, Celeste Ng writes, "Bird and Margaret's world isn't exactly our world, but it isn't not ours, either." This quote encapsulates my first reaction as soon as I turned the very last page of the story: this book scared the hell out of me. No, this was by no means a horror novel in the sense that there were no evil monsters lurking in the shadows or gory murders taking place every couple pages or anything like that. What made this story so scary was how recognizable the dystopian world that Ng created was, especially when looking at the past history of our country, the current realities of what our society has become, and where we are headed in the future. Even scarier still for me was reading this book as a Chinese woman with a background that shares some similarities with Margaret's, and also having myself experienced first-hand many of the prejudices and micro-aggressions that she did at various stages of her life, it heightens the notion that this dystopian society will indeed (unfortunately) become our grim reality in the years to come.
As I was gathering my thoughts to write this review, I decided to deliberately keep it short and vague, mostly because I feel the power of this story is in the experience of reading it. This book was definitely a departure from Ng's previous works and to be honest, I did hesitate to pick it up at first knowing that it would be science fiction (a genre that isn't usually my cup of tea). But as soon as I read the first page, I was drawn in by Ng's beautiful and absorbing writing as well as her masterful storytelling. Now after having read this book, I feel that it would be more appropriate to put this in the "genre mashup" category rather than solely science fiction, as there were aspects of historical, literary, and contemporary fiction in here — I think this is important to point out in case there are other readers like me who might be put off reading genres that they don't usually prefer. I actually ended up finishing this book in essentially one sitting, as I got so absorbed in the story that was unfolding, I had to keep going in order to see how things would turn out.
Lastly, a word about the rating, which I agonized over for quite some time. While there was so much about this book that deserved 5 stars, I ended up going the 4.5 stars route because I felt that the story overall didn't quite have the level of emotional resonance as Ng's previous books, especially as it relates to the characters — which I guess wasn't too surprising given that some of the focus had to be shifted to the "world-building" aspects of the dystopian society that was both a reflection and not a reflection of our current society. As I mentioned earlier in my review, I definitely felt fear and anger at everything that was happening throughout the story, but I didn't really feel the personal, emotional connection to the characters that I was expecting. Having said that, I still found this to be brilliantly written and a worthy (I would even say necessary read) — though of course, given the subject matter, it won't be an easy read by any means.
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