courtinthepages's Book Journey

i feel very blerghhhhh about this. i wanted to love it, it literally has almost all my most favorite ingredients: speculative near-future sci-fi, criss-crossing stories within stories, metatext, writers writing about writers, even SPACE TRAVEL, etc etc and so forth. but idk, somehow nothing ever clicked into place for me. the story, the characters, the tying together of everything, i just wasn’t interested or invested in any of it. i couldn’t immerse myself in a world so wholly unbelievable to me - and no, the unbelievable part wasn’t the robots or the space travel or the ai ghosts, it was the idea that people all over the world really truly fell in love with the book-within-this-book, zelu’s rusted robots. this is a problem that comes up when authors try to write about artists, writers, singers that become incredibly popular. if you’re going to show me the art that supposedly got them such fame and notoriety, that art better be damn good. and the excerpts we got of rusted robots were um… not that. and i love sci-fi!!! there were just too many unbelievable things in this book for me to vibe with it, and i’m willing to suspend disbelief but the way the book was picked up immediately and published and she got an insane advance, the way people recognized her on the street, the way she got emails from TWO different billionaires who pushed the story along without any active movement from our main character, which was not only not at all believable but also narratively boring. i’m curious to read more from this author, but this book was just such a let-down ://

This is such a difficult book to rate, because the ending changed a lot of how I think about the book. I haven’t read a lot of books containing a story within a story yet, but I really liked the concept and that kind of meta feeling. In this case, though, the two stories differed quite a lot in quality and in how much I enjoyed them, which eventually made the whole structure work less well for me and I ended up not paying too much attention to one of them.

My main takeaway from this book is that I enjoyed learning something about Nigerian culture. I also thought Zelu was a fascinating character, even though I didn’t particularly like her. I liked following her story as a disabled Black writer, trying to navigate her life between familiar expectations and her own ambitions. The book raises some interesting questions about using technological advancements to deal with disability and about how much public figures should act as role models for society, which gave me some food for thought.

At the same time, Zelu’s storyline also came with quite a few inconsistencies that annoyed me. The biggest problem for me was the embedded science fiction story. Zelu writes a bestselling book that makes her world famous basically overnight, but when we actually get to read parts of it, it is, at best, just… mid? Nothing special and even boring at times. So the robot chapters completely fell flat for me and I eventually stopped paying much attention to them. I did like how some of the themes and issues were mirrored in both stories, though. Zelu getting artificial legs to be able to walk again, for example, kind of turns her into a robot herself and there are other smaller details that connect the two narratives.

I found the exploration of the notion of „Death of the Author“ really interesting, especially the question of whether a piece of fiction can ever exist independently from the person who created it. How much control does an author actually have over their own creation, what other people think and say about them, and how much freedom should others have when adapting that creation into something new? This was when I thought this could actually be a pretty good book.

However, what annoyed me most was that throughout the story, it was repeatedly implied that something had happened to Zelu. There are interviews about the thing she did, but we just don’t get to it. I was waiting for the story to finally reveal this seemingly major plot point, while her narrative became just increasingly repetitive at parts. Finally, the ending turns out pretty dissatisfying. It definitely was an unexpected twist, but ultimately I just thought „wait, that‘s it?“. In the end, it left me pretty disappointed because the ending retroactively took away some of the meaning I had found in other parts of the story and I can’t really appreciate them in the same way anymore.

Part of me would like to reread the book knowing what I know now, but at the same time, I can’t be bothered because I don’t think it’s worth it. So while I could see the potential in the ideas, the Nigerian setting and some of the thematic connections between the two stories, the ending ultimately left me feeling pretty disappointed.

Some may call it brilliant, but I call it a betrayal. A stupid ass betrayal that ruined any good will I had towards what should have been a beautiful and messy story about disability, family, love, and self. I’m sure there are tons of reasons for why the book is the way it is but I’m still too angry to care.

Read the book at your own risk but be warned you will be angry pretty much the entire time for for wildly different reasons. At least this book is guaranteed to make you feel something

Can't recommend. Felt like the author bit off more than she could chew, and the ambitious themes had a few promising glimmers but were ultimately underdeveloped and buried under extraordinarily terrible characters (main character especially I couldn't say enough bad things about), ridiculous plot, and just really bad writing quality that had me constantly irritated. High point was definitely the representation of Nigerian and Nigerian-American culture. Lowest point was what felt like weird authorial self-adulation through story + genre meta-commentary telling the reader what to understand and appreciate (directly opposing the "death of the author" concept, but not in a fun clever way). And if that's not enough, it throws some pro tech billionaire propaganda in there too? The ending was clearly meant to prompt reflection that leaves the reader more satisfied, but instead struck me as sloppy, underwhelming, and damn near disrespectful to my time.

The moment this book started glorifying technology and self-driving cars, and painted human interaction as something we should want to overcome and strive beyond, this book was dead to me.

Disgusting.

welcome to the Chekhov's gun show, where multiple elements introduced that feel like they will be tied back into the plot later simply aren't.

i think the fastest way to make this book better would be to axe the chapters that are excerpts of Rusted Robots. i understand the attempt to show what Zelu made, but when characters within the book are showering Rusted Robots with praise and my immediate reaction when seeing that a Rusted Robots excerpt will take me 25 minutes to read on my ereader is "oh, come ON"... it just doesn't work. and if those were axed, there would be so much more page time to get to everything introduced that then never becomes truly relevant.

considering how Death of the Author brings in elements of our world today (the three i'm thinking of are AI, self-driving vehicles, and an ultra-rich white man who owns a space exploration company), i really thought it would have more to say about these? but instead, these are there simply as set dressing for the plot. the AI "assistant" app Yebo seems like something that will become very relevant, but the biggest feature it has is (without spoiling the plot) doing something that Zelu could have easily done by tapping a few buttons on her phone. autonomous vehicles? an even worse case. these are introduced with so much time, and there is even a scene where the vehicle goes haywire when Zelu changes its destination, but is there ever any more thought on if autonomous vehicles are truly a good thing? the exploitation that can occur? big companies being able to take advantage of people in yet another way? no. once every chapter, Zelu uses her phone to summon an autonomous vehicle to take her somewhere, and that is it. does our aforementioned ultra-rich white man (who is 100% an Elon Musk stand-in) get any on-page analysis at all? no. none. he just sends people into space! hence, Chekhov's gun show.

despite all of this, i did generally really like the chapters that were set in the real world. while it was extremely difficult for me to suspend my disbelief that an author would become that famous (5 million people watching a Facebook livestream? seriously? i have another tab open while writing this review so i can see what the all-time records for livestream watch counts are, and they definitely go higher than 5 million, but seem to be all for sports, and none are on Facebook), i liked Zelu a lot and thought her journey was fascinating. also liked the sibling dynamics in this book! i don't have any siblings, so it's always interesting to see those sort of bonds in fiction.