Love in the Time of Fridges by Tim Scott

Love 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'.



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