I’m about halfway through this book currently, and I’m considering a DNF just due to the secondhand embarrassment. Before I get into what I don’t like, let me say that I’m a minority myself and lived in Texas for many years, so I’m not interested in being on the receiving end of a lecture about how I “just don’t understand” or how it “just isn’t for you” or XYZ.
The biggest — and by far most distracting — issue is that the author is seemingly trying to tell an engaging thriller story, but you can tell half his brain is obsessed with random social justice topics that he forces into the book that serve literally no purpose other than to remind us that white people are very bad, the United States is very bad, Donald Trump is very bad… and please please please do not forget that white people are VERY bad. I just want to tell the author directly “we get it, you don’t like white people. Please tell the story now.”
The repeated instances of “racism” in this book are frankly extremely cartoonish and ridiculous. I can suspend my disbelief when reading a novel to a certain extent, but this is just insane. At the very beginning of the book the main character is looking up how to make a suppressor for a gun and the author reminds us like three times that the only place he can find information on this is on “white supremacist Internet forums” and he literally gives up trying to make one because all he’s seeing online is about how “minorities are taking over.”
Another part that got me is when the main character is talking about getting a job and says that it’s impossible to get a job if you have a Hispanic-sounding last name… in Texas. Where there are literally more Hispanic people than white people… just… LOL. This part literally prompted me to stop reading and Google if the author had any ties to Texas whatsoever because this claim is just so absurd.
The diner scene is also just so incredibly, incredibly cringe. There seems to be this running theme where the author inserts all these white people into the story out of nowhere who are stunned and surprised to see Hispanic people in Texas and are intent to insult them for no reason. He even describes them as “wearing John Deere hats” and has them literally say “go back to your country!” I was wondering if Jussie Smollett was the ghost writer for this passage. Immediately following this cartoonish scene, he reflects back on a photo of his wife and tells us that right after it was taken a group of white men started harassing her for being brown. Shocking and original.
The whole part with the diner literally read like an obviously-fake Reddit story. I could totally see it on the front page with 20k upvotes. “Me and my friends totally OWN some RACISTS at the local diner! Even knocked their teeth out!! Remember to always punch a Nazi!!!”
This doesn’t even cover the rest of the countless one-off comments that incessantly try to put down white people or the United States for no discernible reason. It does nothing for the plot whatsoever. It literally just seems like the author is trying to write the book but half his brain is seething over white people and this is his strange mechanism for release.
This book is also a quintessential example of a critique I saw on modern literature just recently. I was reading an essay online of a woman explaining that all books nowadays have these ties to “racism” or other fashionable social issues in an attempt to give the novel “mock gravity.” That term “mock gravity” keeps popping into my head as I read this novel. The author seems so desperate to make this book some sort of social commentary that he’s completely jumped the shark, abandoned any sort of legitimate plot, and fallen into this rhythm of introducing over-the-top cruel white people into the story to remind us white people are very bad, and this is supposed to be profound somehow?
I know Redditors eat up this kind of social justice commentary, but this book feels like a total bait-and-switch so far. Does this pick up in the second half? Or is it DNF-worthy?
by xTheKingOfClubs