Book reviews: Three random books

I have been sadly neglecting this blog, and I'm aware of it! I intend to get back into semi-regular posting soon, and I thought the best way to kick off was with a triple book review :-)

It's been another hectic month between surgical recovery, work, and family stuff, but I have squeezed in four more new books since the three life-writing texts I reviewed back on 13 July. Here's a review of three of them. None were tough reads, which helps! Also none were stinkers, but neither were they perfect books.

There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. The atmospheric portrayal of humanity's last years, the complex and nuanced unpacking of what true artificial intelligence in an embodied form might be like, and the exploration of the darker shades of human entitlement were all on point, and executed very well.

The premise of the book is a future world that is very literally dying, or perhaps more accurately, becoming unsurvivable for humans. Into this world, humans have created and refined an artificial species called PCCs - Personal Computing Companions - designed to be a combination of service robot and artificial friend. As the book opens, the PCCs are about to obtain their independence, meaning they will no longer be owned by a human and can make their own choices and decisions.

The protagonist of the first half of the book is a PCC called Abigail by her owner, David, who had her custom-built as an exact replica of his dead wife. 

David is a misogynistic jerk (quel surprise), but "Abigail" is a very interesting character, and keeping the focus on her is a wise choice. The first half of the book is a tense, gripping, vivid picture of a world in a slow-moving crisis and the bitter ends that far too many humans will go to when they feel out of control and their entitlement is wounded.

Then, for me, the book lost its legs a little over halfway through, when the end game plot became obvious. It turns out that David's wife is considerably less dead than PCC Abigail had been led to believe, and in fact simply left her obnoxious husband 17 years earlier. 

PCC Abigail renames herself "Autumn" and sets off in search of OG Abigail, who she finds, and fairly promptly starts a relationship with, a development I disliked for two reasons:

1. The romance between Abigail and Autumn landed both uncomfortably but also shallowly for me, and while I see what Lapinska was trying to do with the sex scenes, they also didn't work well in my view.

2. It took focus away from the far more interesting questions of identity, personhood and what a post-human world might look like, which for me diluted the impact of the text overall. 

Overall, it's a good book, not a great one, and sits squarely in the genre of "robots need love too" dystopia. I give it 7/10.

Yet another memoir that I really enjoyed - such an anomalous reading streak for me! This is the story of two families, representing two quintessential types of Australian - bogans (using that non-pejoratively) and God-botherers (OK, that's slightly more pejorative). It is the story of how the children of the latter came into the care of the former, and everything that flowed from there - written by the only biological child of the Queensland publican, Tom, and his wife Lenore.

Blaine's family story is fascinating, by turns warm, funny, scary, and desperately sad. All the people he writes about come through vividly, especially Blaine himself, Tom and Lenore, and the three foster siblings who are the biological children of the ultra-religious vagrant serial harassers, Michael and Mary Shelley (Steven, John and Hannah). Michael and Mary, despite Blaine's huge efforts and unearthing of so much of their writing, still come off as a little more distant, a bit mysterious, but perhaps that is also down to the fact that both of them were undoubtedly incredibly odd ducks (Mary certainly - and diagnosed - profoundly mentally ill, and Michael, on my read anyway, likely a malignant narcissist as well as a few other things).

I did find it incredibly frustrating how many times Michael and Mary were able to stalk, harass, verbally abuse, threaten, and intimidate such a wide swathe of people, with consequences that seemed wholly inadequate. That said, I do get that longer term incarceration or institutionalisation simply because people are unhinged pests with nasty mouths is neither fair nor possible; I just wish there had been a better way to derail their campaigns without doing so much damage to others, especially their own children.

And I do understand Mary's grief in particular at losing not just custody of, but access to, her children. One of the great strengths of Blaine's book is that he humanises her to a remarkable degree, and never casts doubt on her love for her kids, strange, hectic and at times unhealthy as it was. Despite what she did, I felt enormously sorry for her, especially near the end. The final letter exchange that she had with Hannah brought me to tears.

All in all, a great read, and one I recommend. 8.5/10.

This is a tricky one to rate and review, because there were aspects of it that I really loved and thought worked beautifully, and other aspects that fell quite flat for me. 

Essentially, it's a thriller mystery, with the central device being a man living off-grid in a remote wood property with his eight-year-old daughter, trying to avoid detection and scrutiny, for Reasons that the plot unfolds. Things Happen, Secrets Are Uncovered, Crisis Crisis Resolution (ie the typical beats of a thriller plot).

For me, the strongest elements of the book were:

- the vivid and entrancing picture it painted of off-grid / close to self-sufficient life shielded from the modern world (shades of My Side of the Mountain and even the recent tv show Sweet Tooth here, I love these kinds of stories)

- the complicated persona and ambiguous actions of Coop, the narrator / MC

- the relationship between Coop and his daughter, Finch, which I found moving and not saccharine

- the backstory elements related to veteran PTSD and abandonment by society, which I thought were really well handled and also provided an actually reasonable plot explanation for why Jake, the property owner, even allowed his old comrade to live invisibly in the remote cabin

However, that has to be counterpointed with what I thought were the weaker elements, namely:

- the pacing: this book spends a LOT of time setting up for what seems like it will be a major plot element that I won't name here to avoid spoiling, but in fact that element is resolved completely in half a page, feeling quite rushed and disjunctive

- the introduction of a romance-ish subplot in a way that I found entirely implausible and awkward

- the ending, which I didn't really like and thought undid some of the great atmospheric work of the first half of the book

It's a quick and not demanding read and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys these kinds of books, but I also wouldn't rave about it. I enjoyed it though! 7/10.