Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Love in the Time of Fridges by Tim Scott

Love in the Time of FridgesLove in the Time of Fridges by Tim Scott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's not often that a book leaves me as uncertain as this one does. Parts 1 & 2 were odd, amusing, a bit confusing (but not in a way that really detracted from the experience). Part 3, alas, fell apart, leaving me feeling all sorts of...eh...towards the book.

Scott's prose is light, breezy, charming, incredibly quotable (about 50% of this book is worth memorizing to sprinkle in conversation), with just a hint of profundity, and a touch of sadness.

Other than the protagonist, Huckleberry Lindbergh, the characters are more hints, or sketches, of characters--in a couple of cases, a hint of a sketch--rather than fully-developed characters. Given that this is a thriller (and a fairly satirical one at that), it works, we don't need complete backstories. Fridges is about the plot and the world Scott's imagined, not people.

This is a world where the Nanny State has run amok, drunk on marketing. In part of their benevolent(-ish) efforts to protect the citizenry, they've developed technology to listen to moods, and search, print, and erase 24-hours worth of memory (anything more than that will likely lead to severe damage).

Oh, and there's the whole thing with sentient, verbal, and semi=intelligent appliances and furniture. No idea what that was all about.

The novel was built on a tight inner logic, and was a heckuva ride, until Part 3 where Scott found/created a loophole in that logic and gave his reader a sloppy deus ex Heisenberg uncertainty principle ending. And that's where he lost me. I'm still giving it three stars for the fun leading up to that tho'.



View all my reviews

0 comments: