Looping, mutli-vantage point narratives are a hard sell but Joma West's dystopian sci-fi take was a genuinely interesting take on perception and facades taking a twisted look at how pervasive beauty standards are.

(i received this e-ARC from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

taught, chilling, and certainly food for thought.

Face follows several people in a not-to-distant world obsessed with appearances. Whether you’re navigating the digital world of the “In” or trying to maintain that status in the real-world of the “Out,” everything is about status and climbing the ladder. The cracks in Schuyler and Maddie are starting to appear, and we’re thrust into their world to see certain events unravel not only from their points-of-view, but also from their two daughters and two friends of theirs. It gives us insight into this status-obsessed world, people’s motivations, and the dangers of one wrong social decision.

I’m always down to read anything published by Tor, and this book was interesting. The alternating points-of-view painted a rich picture of a short period of time, and the short interjections of the “Menial’s” (servant’s) confessions provided a completely different perspective of this world. I’ll admit, I’d like to delve deeper into this world, see what happens if it becomes a dystopian revolution type scenario rather than just the day-to-day life of these rich, high-society people. Like one of the daughters, I was fascinated by the class system of the Menials and would like to know more about them, see where they go, especially if Schuyler and Maddie’s cracks are indicative of a larger problem that may lead to a sot of revolution. But maybe I’ve gone to far, delved too deep, and said too much.

It’s a slow-moving, character-driven book that invites us to reflect on our own selves, how much time we spend on social media and how we let it affect our real-world lives as well as the facades we create and how those blend into our lives as well. Recommend for some deep contemplation. It’s out now wherever you get your books.

Interesting premise with potential to be really cool book but it felt like a first draft. The author needed to get deeper with the characters and to expand their stories, instead of padding the book by repeating many scenes in different point of views but without any new insight or information. The most interesting part was about the menials. It would have been great if Reyna actually got more into her project so the reader could experience what she found out.

Published by Tordotcom on August 2, 2022

Face is a heavy-handed examination of superficiality. The novel imagines a society in which the upper classes are obsessed with how they are seen by others and thus with the image (or “face”) they project to the world. People make choices about “coupling” (sex-free attachments) based on what their potential partner adds to their face. Style has triumphed over substance. Individuals turn their lives into a brand to help them climb the ladder. They learn to project the correct facial expression (usually blandness, sometimes a cutting sideways glance) rather than honest emotions. Joma West may have done her research for this novel by watching high school girls interact.

Tam schemes to couple with Reyna because her father, Schuyler Burroughs, has more face than anyone. Schuyler’s friends Tonia and Eduardo decide to choose a baby because their face has become static and the right baby will help them move up in the social hierarchy (the “ladder”). Yet Reyna argues that styles change too rapidly to warrant investing in a child. By the time it grows into its features, it might be out of date.

For reasons the story doesn’t satisfactorily explain, touching is a social taboo. The burden of procreation has been assigned to designers that manufacture babies who are calculated to enhance the parents’ face. The working class, including servants of the upper class, are known as “menials.” They begin as “beaker babies” who are engineered to lack inquisitive or creative minds. Menials degrade after reaching the age of 25 (a concept that might be drawn from the replicants in Blade Runner). Menial farms train them to be deferential servants and to avoid unnecessary behaviors, including eye contact and masturbation. Like people on the ladder, they confess misbehavior to confessors in Virtual Reality (the “In”).

Reyna’s sister Naomi receives confessions of menials as part of a school project. Without mentioning her by name, the Menial Jake confesses that he wants to look directly at Madeline, Schuyler’s wife, and have a conversation with her. A loose plot eventually emerges, but West focuses more on world building than on telling an engaging story.

The novel suggests that humanity’s enduring attempt to exercise control over others, whether through slavery or ownership of menials, is rooted in fear. The concept of face is an extension of the need to control others, albeit in a more subtle way — by manipulating what people think by showing them a face and making it difficult to see beyond that mask. The ladder that members of the upper class climb is a road to power and the acquisition of power is all about controlling those who have less. That’s a good concept for a story, but the concept is delivered in expository lectures to make sure that even dim-witted readers will understand it.

Each chapter is told from a character’s perspective. Some scenes are repeated (dialog is repeated word-for-word), changed only by the perspective of the character to whom the chapter belongs. Since the characters aren’t all that different from each other, the technique results in more redundancy than insight. The reader learns what happened in the scene after the first point-of-view character departed, but that could have been accomplished through conventional storytelling without all the wasted words.

It is difficult to relate to Face because key premises make little sense. It isn’t clear whether the story is set on a future Earth or (more likely) on an alternative Earth, but the notion that humans would have an aversion to touching requires some explanation. Sex and the desire for touch are innate drives. How is it possible to be human, even an alternative human, without those drives? Much of the world that West built exists not because a such a world would have any reason to evolve, but because West needed to create elements that would allow her to skewer superficial and controlling people. Some of the differences between our reality and the novel’s reality can be chalked up to genetic manipulation, but what can a novel about a completely different reality tell us about ours? Not as much as West intended.

Satires of the status obsessed are common. Some of them are enjoyable. Had Face illustrated the impact of social media likes on social status by creating a near-future that is closer to current reality, the story’s lessons about superficiality might have resonated. By adding designer babies and humans grown to be slaves, West created a story that has too little relevance to create an emotional impact. I appreciated West’s fluid prose and enjoyed some aspects of the detailed world she built, but the story is less than the sum of its parts.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The prose was skillfully written but the structure did my head in. I’m all for overlapping povs. I can even get behind seeing the same scene from three different viewpoints if it adds something each time either to the story of the characters. But this didn’t really. It was a stylistic choice and didn’t work for me. Since that kind of thing booted me out of the story, I found I didn’t even enjoy the dystopian setting that much. Added to which the political metaphor where saving face and the class system are intimately entwined, felt a little heavy handed. So overall this one didn’t really land for me. Brave choices that might boot this to the top of someone else’s list. Alas, I am not that someone.

Based on the synopsis I had high expectations for this book and it sounded like something that would be great for book discussions and book clubs but I felt like it didn’t go in the direction I had hoped and fell flat. I struggled to stay focused and engaged.

People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,” “likes” and the ever-elusive virality.

In Joma West’s debut novel Face (Tordotcom, 2022), climbing the ladder is everything. The way you act and dress, who you couple with, how you move and talk—it all adds up to “face,” which, in turn, determines your job, where you live, who you befriend and the quality and quantity of opportunities available to you. Every second—at home, in public or on the “In”(ternet)—is carefully choreographed. It’s a cold world, where even children are curated to advance social standing.

With everyone—even enslaved “menials”—hiding their thoughts and feelings, people turn to anonymous confessors to express their emotions. Through a Rashomonic narrative where the reader re-experiences the same scenes from different characters’ points of view, West reveals the tensions underlying every interaction and the emotional cost of living in a society that values external success over internal well-being.

“Face is a game, a way of life, a survival mechanism,” West says. “It's essentially everything that you are when you're on the hierarchy. If you're a menial you have no face, so it doesn't matter, but if you're someone on the social ladder of any kind, your face is everything. And it is what ensures that you are at the level that you're at, and it also ensures how you climb the ladder as well.”

I was excited to delve into the dystopian, Black Mirror-esque dynamic of this book. I'm not usually a reader of sci-fi or dystopian novels, but was caught by the intruiging premise.

Unfortunately this was a difficult one to get through, and I was reading it off and on for some time. The writing felt slightly clunky, repetitive and hard to follow, and the story did not grip me enough to read as often as I would have liked.

I went into Face somewhat blindly after having requested an early copy months prior to reading it, and having forgotten a majority of the blurb. My thoughts were: this sounds interesting, let's see what happens. And overall, I had a good time reading this book, which felt reminiscent of Brave New World but yet quite different from it as well. As a piece of speculative fiction rooted in sci-fi, I think this is a good introduction into the genre for anyone who would be coming from the literary fiction side of things.

I particularly enjoyed how the writing flowed in this book. Some chapters felt very stream-of-consciousness-y, as we fly through a whole bunch of different perspectives surrounding the same few events. In particular, I liked the recurring perspective of Jake, the Burroughes' menial who works for them but is not even on the 'face ladder', a popularity ranking, due to his being a beaker baby raised to serve top tiers. In fact, my favourite parts of this book were the ones revolving around the menials, especially Naomi's and Vidya's perspectives, which I wish I could have read more of. Overall, I enjoyed reading from the perspectives of almost all of the family members of this household. I personally liked that the reader does not get a whole lot of world-building to work with, leaving a lot to the imagination, because what clearly mattered the most were the interactions between the characters.

However, I cannot give this book more than 3 stars because more often than not, the characters' chapters ended on a sort of cliffhanger, leaving me wanting more from most of them, but never actually reaching that point. While I liked the open-endedness of this story, and expected it from the start, as a character study I wish that I could have read more from Naomi specifically. The ending felt a bit abrupt, and I wish the author would have made this story longer, so that the reader could get more development from the characters that, in my opinion, mattered the most. Perhaps, some secondary characters' chapters could have been shortened, or removed entirely (I'm still not sure why we got Tonia's perspective, for instance, but I did see the reason behind Morton's). I also wished that we didn't see the same conversations reoccurring two to three times in the span of 270 pages, and I feel like there could have been something done there to improve the depth of this story.

I would recommend this book to new sci-fi readers who are trying their hand at the genre, as it is easy to follow along, does not use a whole bunch of invented words that are hard to wrap your head around, and generally feels like a work of literary/contemporary fiction. The themes in this book are also interesting, mainly revolving around class, popularity, being 'on trend', and how these different characters cope with the insane societal standards of their time.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

A twisting dystopian that doesn't elaborate on itself, but leaves the reader to fill in the blanks. The weight of the ideas and sensations they evoke make up for some of the less-than-compelling character development and world building.

BY: CHRISTINA LADD
ISSUE: 20 JUNE 2022

Though thoroughly dystopian, Joma West’s novella Face isn’t about a boot stamping on a human face forever. Here, the footwear is more of a red-bottomed stiletto pressing ever-so-sexily on the back of humanity’s neck. Humanity kind of likes this dystopia. It’s pretty, and there are any number of bright, fun distractions to be had when you plug into the In, the internet of the future across which social media is entirely pervasive. The In overlays the Out, a perpetual connection that is also perpetual surveillance. Where 1984 was a dystopia of scarcity, Face is a dystopia of plenty. Its characters do not require brutal correction: they correct themselves, or, when failing to do so, blame only themselves for their failures to conform. If they don’t present a good face to the world, they fall down the social ladder, and nothing—not slavery, not ignorance, not the total absence of human connection—is worse than that.

I have been super intrigued by the concept of Face since I first heard about it. It is set in (seemingly) the near future, where social media has taken center stage, and the rich can literally design their own babies, from top to bottom. It's a great concept, and I liked more than I didn't, so let's break it down!

What I Liked:

►People designing babies and living their entire lives for social media status? Yeah, sounds legit. The whole concept of this book is fairly plausible- perhaps not in the exact way it's executed, but certainly in the social constructs and ideas it presents. Nearly the entirety of society is concerned with what sort of image they project to the world, and very little about just living their own lives. As you can likely imagine, it takes a certain amount of privilege to even compete in this society- you can't exactly be born into poverty and become rich/famous, since it takes a vast amount of resources simply to play the game.

►I was quite interested in how the various characters coped with this world. There are several points of view during this book, from the Haves, the Have Nots, and even those in society who aren't deemed good enough to be given the label of person. Those in the positions of wealth and power are perfectly willing to preserve the status quo, even though they may even understand on a moral level how wrong it all is. But a few are seemingly more willing to at least consider whether their way of life is just (we the reader obviously know it is not), or whether there are better ways to live.

►It is certainly thought provoking. I mean, I don't think I'd do very well in this world, frankly? I am not wealthy or popular enough to manufacture my own baby, and I highly doubt anyone would be interested in my social profile, so... things are looking bad for me. But imagine you were born into this mess, how exactly would you ever have known anything different? Honestly, it is a very depressing world, and I for one am glad to not be in it!

What I Had Trouble With:

►The repeated conversations from multiple POVs is... A choice. So, as we're reading the POVs from various characters, often there was an overlap in conversations and events. For example, if Dad is talking to Daughter, we get the conversation repeated, from both of their points of view. This provides no real additional information, but does make things longer than necessary. I assumed that the purpose was to give the reader glimpses into how both characters were relating to a situation, but more often than not, it actually didn't, and just felt repetitive and unnecessary.

►I was a little confused about how the whole Face system worked, honestly. There were virtual reality type events and places, but then there were real places, but it all seemed to somehow come back to how much society liked you as a concept, no matter where you were. That part I could grasp of course, but the day-to-day basics were a little tougher for me to connect to, and I think as such, I had some trouble figuring out what the characters were up to at times.

►I didn't feel much connection with the characters. In fairness, I assume that was probably part of the point? I mean- how can you connect with someone when they're constantly revamping their persona for the most social media views? Still, it makes it a bit harder to care about what happens to them, since we've no real idea who most of them are beyond the Face.

Bottom Line: Incredibly interesting and thought provoking concept, I just wished it had been fleshed out a bit more.

In near-future society, everything comes down to maintaining Face, masterly control over one’s image, the light in which others perceive you. Domination of diverse social media, and selfishly calculated steps in the dances of social interactions to build influence and control, become rewarded by a climb up the ladder of class and power. Marriages are built only upon convenience, a mutual benefit of improved Face, increased attention. Children are carefully designed, with the best possibilities available to the highest class, using the most talented of genetic artists. In an existence where success and fulfillment comes only from the construction of a virtual profile and celebrity persona, traditional forms of community and physical interactions have vanished. The concept of physical touch is anathema, and no respectable person would have a child other than through a professional biological surrogate who can fare no better.

Schuyler and Madeline Burroughs (together forming SchAddie) exist at the very top rung of society, with Faces of perfection that can make no missteps and who can afford eccentricity. They live as models and envy for others to follow and emulate, and to court their favor. But underneath those Face masks of perfection, sits discontentment and strife within the SchAddie household. Their designer children maintain their own exceptional Face, yet also don’t seem to be living up to the potential for which they were made. Maddie lives on edge, finding it harder to feign happiness and control, particularly with the increasingly risky behavior of Schuyler against conventions and expectations.

Case in point: Schuyler has inexplicably befriended a young couple who are hoping to get a baby of their own. While not socially low, they are not high up along the ladder to be able to get the best doctor out there without Schuyler’s support. Which, he oddly seems eager to provide, without any seeming benefit for himself. He arranges to host a party with Maddie in their home to introduce the young couple to the most famous baby designer around.

Also at that party are all the Menials owned by SchAddie, genetically engineered and trained human servants who are designed to have no will or desires of their own, constructs with a fleetingly short life-span and no rights. But one of their Menials harbors secrets of his own buried beneath the emotionlessly servile mask. Despite the design and training, he is feeling urges to transcend the rules: sexual desire and an increasingly difficult yearning to reach out and touch the skin of his mistress.

In a certain way, Face could be considered as a collection of interconnected short stories as much as a novel. Each of the main chapters presents the point-of-view portrait of a unique character. In other words, Face is itself a compilation of distinct character faces into a whole. Between each of these chapters are interludes from the perspective of a Menial who has started going to a confessional online in an effort to fight his prohibited compulsions, taking the added bizarre initiative of giving himself a name en lieu of his official Menial registration number.

The fragmentary construction of Face is central to its themes, purpose, and success. This future society is fragmentary itself, built from competing individuals whose only sense of community comes from naked desire for personal gain, never risking to sacrifice and lose Face. On the smaller scale, each of the characters we meet are fragmentary identities. There is the public persona they present in the online world and at engagements. But there is also their actual desires and thoughts beneath the ersatz, a personality they never let stray from their own mind or private moments where they think they are alone, unsurveilled.

The construction of the novel also means that it lacks strict linearity or one distinct protagonist arc. One you have a chapter from a given point-of-view, you’re done. The character will appear again, but you won’t get any further closure to their unique perspective. This is what’s brilliant about Face, because it’s all about perspective and how one appears compared to what really lies beneath, known only to oneself.

The construction also means that events that occur in one chapter will reappear in another, usually with blocks of identical dialogue. I have noticed many reviews of Face that criticize such receptiveness, but I can’t help but feel these have failed to appreciate just how essential the element is to the novel. Not only is it essential, it is exactly the element that drew me in to keep reading with intense curiosity. Again, it’s all about perspective.

West gives us a scene from one point of view and then later revisits that same scene from another individual’s senses and interpretations. The spoken words may stay the same, but the inflection of them, their interpretation, and the reading of body movements and actions brought on by that dialogue all shift. For instance, we see a character speaking to Schuyler early in the novel from their point of view, noting their uncertainties over why Schuyler uses particular words or frowns. Later, we get that same scene from Schuyler’s point of view.

As the novel progresses the reader begins to learn just how all the characters are connecting and tie together with the SchAddie corse. We get to learn about the characters from multiple directions, intimately and distantly alike. And we also begin to get a deeper sense of the complexity of the society in Face: its various strata of social class, and the large amount of discontentment that sits universally across the class spectrum, despite the veneer.

An engaging social commentary, Face inventively takes a look at the ways in which preoccupations with self and recognition in an increasingly digital civilization can go awry, stripping away the basics of humanity and healthy relationships social and biological. I wish I could easily go more into the various characters and events of Face, but things are so juxtaposed and woven to make summary impossible. These are elements simply to be discovered by reading.

Face is a compelling near-future dystopia of competitive social pretense, formed from interlacing portraits of individuals who thirst for biological & psychological connection. With all their energies devoted to cultural success that ultimately leaves them empty and dysfunctional, they seek fulfillment through community that paradoxically compels and disgusts them. There’s a bleak horror to Face, not unlike an episode of Black Mirror, an apt comparison that others have drawn. For all its coldness and distance, it’s an emotionally resonant narrative that readers are forced to stitch together from disparate conflicting perspectives into a singular community of reality.

4.5
I loved this!

This is a dystopian future where people don't touch and maintain "faces" with a focus on social climbing. There are severe social classes with the lowest class being called menials, bred for service, and having a short life span.

This is a snapshot. It covers a relatively short period of time, but we return to the same scenes several times, always from a new perspective. I thought it worked really well and was fascinating.

I think the weakness or limitation of this book is that a snap shot is really all it is. We just get to see a bit of this bizarre future. But this small bite packs a punch and we get to see the way this world is straining at the seams. I found it really satisfying.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for the e-arc.

Sexual violence? No Other content warnings? Classism, dysfunctional family, manipulation.

This book is a play on dystopian fiction with a bent towards the metaverse and it reminded me a lot of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. There’s an unnatural vibe throughout, and very similarly to Klara and the Sun, I found myself wanting things explained more - that it’s up to the reader to decipher the rules of this world rather than them being clear. The story focuses on one Family - a Father who has nearly perfected his Face but seems to have some cracks around the edges, a Mother who climbed her way to the top and seems to be struggling with her current position, one daughter who seems perfect but quickly gets sucked in too far, and another daughter who feigns disinterest but is asking all the right (or, depending on who you ask the wrong) questions. More so than having an easily conveyed plot, it’s more of a character study and seeing the ways that various POVs experience the same things in very different ways. It’s a look at how an oppressive system weighs on various people.

I have a bunch of questions still: are faces LITERALLY interchangeable, or is it just a term used for certain strategies of interacting? Why climb the ladder if at every level it seems like there are no actual benefits? When you’re “in” I imagine that’s similar to the vision of the metaverse, or is it more just like an AR interface within your body, or is it all of the above? What happens with Naiomi?

And I still haven’t decided if the narrative structure is creative or lazy. Basically, each chapter after the first couple overlaps with the story already told, but from a different perspective. We get to see how various lives interact and intersect, and we get to see that vast divergence in responses, but the extent of repeated dialogue seemed redundant and lazy at times. But so much of this world is internal, so the only way we get any authenticity is through a character's POV. I’m still torn on how I feel about it…

But ultimately I’m glad I read this one, and I highly recommend it if you liked Klara and the Sun!

**I received a free e-galley copy of Face thanks to netgalley and tordotcom **

3.5 stars

I think if you view this as a slice of life narrative, it makes more sense and feels more enjoyable.
Essentially, we see the same handful of events/conversations happen from multiple POVs. Because this society is concerned with “Face”, which involves having a very deliberately chosen aesthetic (brand), the characters don’t give a lot away to each other. Emotional reactions are frowned upon, so every interaction is measured and calculated. It’s only after reading each POV that we can start to understand their motivations and true feelings.
In “Face”, your physical appearance is everything. People choose their partners according to how well their aesthetics complement each other, and babies are designed by scientists to look pleasing alongside their parents. The better the family aesthetic, the higher their standing in society. What’s interesting is that all the families are multiracial, to choose a child that looks genetically like you is completely unacceptable and is believed to have a “psychological impact” on the parents. Everything you do, post on the In (online) and how you’re perceived on the Out (IRL) must be meticulously planned and considered as everything you do is ranked and rated, and affects the overall standing of your whole family. Social media is everything and many people have various online “faces” they use that differ from how they present on the Out. This was really reminiscent of Nosedive from Black Mirror, and has eerie Jordan Peele-esque vibes.
Physical touch is a no-go and those who couple don’t have sex. The few outliers who reject these rules are called freaks and fetishists. I really liked this concept but it was never fully explained or fleshed out and I would’ve have liked to know why/how this society got to this point.
Initially I found the complete repetition of some dialogue a bit jarring and confusing, but it reveals subtleties about each character that we don’t see from other character POVs. The ending fully took me by surprise too. There are hints throughout that something horrible and unimaginable happens but I truly did not see it coming. I wish some characters and plot points had been explored a little further but overall I really enjoyed this read and look forward to whatever else Joma West has in store.

Face is a story about a society where the only thing that matters is your face. This includes facial beauty but also the other aspects of you face like showing emotions. There is a class system and people try to “save face” or “trade up” by using babies that were created to look the most beautiful with them. The story concept was very interesting but I have two major problems with this novel. First, from page one the author jumps into the narrative of the story and nothing is really explained. You do get some aspects of the world shown throughout the story but the world never felt fully developed. Second, the story is told from multiple perspectives (which is fine) but each time you switch perspectives you get the same scene that was told the chapter before but just from the new perspective. If the story line was progressing with the new perspectives I could have tolerated it better. Unfortunately, very little was added with each repeating of the same scene. This made the book read incredibly slow because it took so long to keep re-reading already told scenes. Also, the conclusion felt just kinda meh. I hope the author come back with another book and interesting topic but writes more direct and descriptive.

Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley for this arc in exchange for my honest feedback.

What a truly strange dystopian tale this book has weaved. What may have been a stellar performance just did not hit the mark for me, sadly.
In the world of “Face” one is defined by their social presence and the “Face” they “Present” to the world. These faces are not their real faces of course, but the faces they have contrived. (The ala carte designer faces) these facades.
There is no such thing as touch in the upper echelon, but a renowned sense of slavery rings true throughout the hierarchal tiers, with them owning menials.
Menials give the hierarchy’s “Power” and “Esteem,” because the menials are simply born and bred to do nothing else but serve.
They (for instance Jake) are seen as nothing more than “THINGS”
Even their “designer children” which if you are on the higher ring of the ladder, can you use a stud farm. Medically you can choose whatever appearance you wish your baby to appear, in regard to their parents. So! It is all about the parents of course, they really do not care about the child per se. It is all about what the appearance of what will be portrayed on the internet. Because like today, that is what is most important. But if you are on the lower rungs of the echelon, you get what is known as a breaker baby. Hmmm! Sucks to be you, I guess!
SO! Many of the scenes are exhaustively repetitive and retold and retold only with different narratives.
True this a dystopian novel, however it felt way too robotic.
West you can tell is an incredibly talented author, however I think this particular novel may have been a bit rushed.
A partner on this book, or more people adding to the pot could have made this book soar. This book totally gave me Jordan Peele vibes and I can see a movie spin off from this with major development. Right now, this book fell flat for me.
No offense at all to West. Major kudos for having McMillian-Tor/Forge publishing this book. That alone is worth all the 5 stars in the world, “The HELL with what I think”
Remember, one person’s 1 star is another person’s 5 star.
Thank you NetGalley for this digital ARC, to Joma West and McMillian-Tor/Forge. Reviews are of my own volition.

This novel tries to tackle issues of identity, online personas and relationships as well as social class, hierarchy and genetic design, yet none of these are handled particularly well. The narrative is clunky, the characters are superficial (no pun intended) and the plot is repetitive and redundant. The book started out strongly but quickly lost its way in attempting to include too much and not really focusing on anything. It could have been great; it turned out terrible.