by Gabrielle Zevin
I’ll try to alternate my positive and negative comments, because I don’t want to give the impression that either should necessarily be given more weight, because as of yet I’m not sure myself how I would weigh them…
But first and foremost: it’s a novel about a STEM field. Always a YAY. Not only that, but it’s in large part about a WOMAN in STEM. A woman programmer, no less. Hallelujah!
Next: it was too long. It didn’t help that I read it on Kindle where you don’t get a physical sense of how much more you have to read. I kept feeling, “SURELY it ends here, right?” And it never did. There were so many spots where she could have ended it well.
Great characters. Semi-SPOILER in this paragraph. Marx was such an absolute doll. Too much so? Perhaps he should have been given a rough edge or two. But some people really are dolls. The way his life ended was very moving.
OTOH, Sadie. Sadie was such an absolute (expletive) to Sam! After they moved to California and she decided for some reason he wasn’t really her friend? Where did this even come from? It was awful, her always giving him this crap, “Oh you just want to take credit,” “Oh you just don’t think I can do it do you,” when he so obviously, OBVIOUSLY wasn’t like that. And finally her, “Just leave me alone” ultimatum – even when he started playing a public game with her? When she finds out it’s him, “OH I told you to leave me alone!” I mean Jeez, he’s just playing a game with you. She was just a plain and total (expletive).
Sam was the main character and he felt just a little incoherent at times. Awkward, yet a master showman at conferences? But then, some people really are incoherent. I’ll take this kind of strange complexity over one-dimensional characters any day.
I didn’t really like the pregnancy and baby plot development, because I never do; but at least they didn’t make the kid a main character with a bratty personality that I was supposed to find adorable. But peeve: When these obviously brilliant STEM-focused women in novels, women who obviously have the kinds of brains that are attuned to details and planning, discover, Wow! They’re suddenly pregnant! How did THAT happen? Oh well! It was the same in the abominable LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY. You just accept this plot development, that the woman let herself get pregnant, and what’s annoying is the story DOESN’T EVEN GO INTO which method of birth control she was using failed and how this actually happened. They just treat it like, ha ha of course these things happen! I’m not saying they don’t happen, I’m a walking-around accident myself, but I am saying that intelligent grown-ups like these characters are painted to be take STEPS to make sure as much as possible that they don’t happen, and the novel should at least in passing talk about what steps failed and how they screwed up, and they don’t even mention it. We know this baby wasn’t planned because she and Marx consider abortion; so tell me how the plans went awry.
I guess my final comment is: I can’t see Magic Eye pictures either. I was a little annoyed that at the end, Sam finally saw a Magic Eye picture just by virtue of Sadie on the phone with him saying “My 4-year-old can see them so I’m going to stay on the phone with you until you do!” Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. Some of us cannot see them. I read in the end notes that the author didn’t used to be able to see them either, but now she can. I guess someone got on the phone with her and berated her into seeing them too, because vision works that way.
I want to end as I began, by reiterating that I really do love books about women in STEM. Thank you!
Tytania 