Three star review, originally posted here on March 29, 2024.
This is not a book that, at first glance, interested me. Judging the book by its cover, nothing jumped out at me. It’s about a grocery store? I dunno, seems kinda touchy-feely. And the cover art is just some nondescript dude standing around holding a basketball? [note: there’s no basketball in this book. Zooming in on the cover I guess it’s supposed to be… no idea. Some sort of nondescript disc?] It’s not that the book looked bad, just nothing about it drew me in.
But, for some reason that I couldn’t quite understand at the time, this book was CONSTANTLY showing up in every “You Might Like” or “Recommended For You” or “Readers Also Enjoyed” list I encountered for what felt like months. The Algorith Gods really, really, REALLY thought I should read this book. Every dark history non-fiction title I’ve picked up recently (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, A Fever in the Heartland) pushed this book at me, to the point that I assumed it was dark history non-fiction as well. It didn’t seem to make much sense, but it was getting pushed at me so hard that, when my Libby app popped this title on my screen as some sort of “Skip the Line!” special for audiobooks with long waitlists where you can listen immediately, I thought it was fate. Okay, fine, I’ll check it out. The universe wants me to read it. It must be good!
It was… fine.
But it has virtually nothing in common with any of the other books I’ve been reading, and eventually I realized that the algorithm was paying no attention to what I actually enjoy reading, and was instead pushing books that were appearing on the Best of 2024 lists, regardless of genre or subject matter. JFC I hate algorithms sometimes.
Anyway, I liked the idea of this book enough I guess. But I can certainly understand all the negative reviews from people who DNFed because it was so slow to get moving. I just didn’t feel pulled into it until the second half, when we finally got to follow the story of Dodo. That’s when we finally had a plot that I found interesting enough to grab my attention. That’s when all the previous stories and characters started coming together a bit. But only a bit. There were a lot of characters with a lot of backstories, and it was a little difficult to keep them all straight. But this didn’t bug me so much as the fact that I didn’t feel particularly invested in any of them. It was tough to tell who we should care about; who are the protagonists vs the side characters. Then at the end we’re given a happy ending about one particular character, and I was thinking, “Oh… was this person our protagonist? I had no idea.” The characters and story just weren’t strong enough to make me feel invested. And plot points that were clearly supposed to be important were, to me, so boring and confusing that I just didn’t follow them. (I’m specifically thinking of the history of the water lines in the town, which, it turns out, was a big deal.)
That being said, this certainly was not a bad book! Like it said, it was fine. There were lots of really great quotes from various characters about identity, nationality, what it means to be a real American, etc. I appreciated the contracts and parallels drawn between various ethnic groups, their experiences, and their perspectives in this supposed melting pot we call America. To me this was the real strength of the book, and the plot was secondary.
Helga without the H 