Reviews
** spoiler alert ** tidak sesuai ekspetasi blurb nya aja yg kek wow, tp isinya ga ada ga dikasi tau siapa pembunuhnya, ga ada tujuannya tiap bab kek cerpen doang, wasting of time
interesting read. i feel this could be a very good basis for screen adaptation with its convincing final girl act. reading some reviews wow it's a bit funny how misunderstood was this one....
I am having a hard time conjuring words to describe both this book and how I feel about this book. This might have been the most bizarre book I have read in 2022. This author had previously been a National Book Award finalist for a book I never read. I have found that I typically don’t enjoy the National Book Award books, so I didn’t have high expectations for this one prior to reading it. I thought the synapsis was intriguing, however, so I might have held onto a little hope that it might be decent. It was not, in fact, decent. It was bizarre. The “story,” if it can even be described as such, is very character-centric. The reader is thrown into a sad apartment complex called Saha, with a cast of misfits that don’t fit into society. They live in a country called Town, previously controlled by a failed corporation and taken over by a vague council who are unknown to the people of Town. Every person has a designation as either a citizen, L2, or on a working contract and thus legally able to live in Town. Anybody not under one of those designations was considered an illegal alien. Saha housed many illegal aliens, in a series of buildings without electricity or running water. The residents of Saha are the main focus, and the reader is given extensive but incomplete information for many of them. We meet the brother and sister who arrived as refugees, a strange Granny, the janitor, a research specimen who isn’t fully aware that’s what she is, and a disgraced doctor. They are all hiding something, and hiding from something; scraping out life every way they are able. What emerges is more a series of character studies that are connected than a story with a cohesive plot line. While they’re all just trying to stay alive, the hows and the whys aren’t very clear. We are given what should be the climax of the story, but then it just kinda petered away into nothingness. There were so many questions left unanswered that it’s hard to consider this an actual story. This is book that incudes a bunch of pictures of different people that don’t quite come together as a bigger picture. There are too many holes and missing pieces. I was pretty disappointed with the end, which just made the entire book disappointing.
