Genre:
Dystopian
Description:
“Watch
out. You might get what you're after.
A
post-electoral dystopia blues, Burning
Down the House describes
the future breakdown of a once great nation following the rise of a
tiny-fingered snake oil salesman.”
Author:
Born
in Liverpool, also the birthplace of The Beatles, Evangeline Jennings
now lives in Texas. After contributing and editing a slew of short
story collections, she wrote Burning
Down the House, her first
novel. A fan and connoisseur of popular music, you can be confident
she knows her book shares a title with one of the biggest hits from
the Talking Heads.
Appraisal:
According
to Wikipedia the dystopian genre is “the portrayal of a setting
that completely disagrees with the author's ethos.” Typically the
story will imagine a political or cultural direction someone proposes
and picture the slide down a slippery slope to disaster. Not
mentioned, but I think a logical conclusion, is that the reader's
“ethos” being similar to the author's is going to increase the
odds of the reader viewing the book as a good read or making a good
point.
When I
started reading Burning
Down the House it was
before the election. The possibility of “a tiny-fingered snake oil
salesman” being elected President of the United States was still
just a bad dream. (Yeah, I'm definitely in the target audience for
this book.) By the time I finished, the bad dream had come true. That
post-election perspective is the one all readers going forward will
be viewing the story from, so that's the one I'll talk about.
Dystopias
aren't pretty and Ms. Jennings has done an excellent job of imagining
how ugly the country could become if the tiny-fingered tyrant of her
story did everything his real life equivalent has implied,
threatened, or suggested. A wild ride down the slippery slope later
and very few are left happy. There are a lot of characters with
different story threads for each and the only thing tying them
together is the changes happening in their country. At times this
challenged my memory (who is this again? Where did we leave them
last?) but I managed.
Luckily
I was able to remember that this is fiction. Slippery slope arguments
are fallacious. This could never happen, right? Oh my gosh, I hope
not.
FYI:
Adult
language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating:
**** Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count:
60-65,000 words
No comments:
Post a Comment