I recently started reading more frequently as a result of missing it and feeling guilty about not progressing in my Goodreads 2019 Book Challenge. I was suggested Pop Apocalypse by Lee Konstantinou.
Book CW/TW:
- There are I believe 2 date-rapey scenes. The main character is in fact introduced via one of them.
- MC expresses sexual interest in a 16 year old girl, despite being 27/28 in the book.
Rating: 2/5 stars
I found this book incredibly boring for the first half. Once I got to the start of the main arc, I regained interested for a short while before losing it once again. There are certain instances of hilarity but as someone who prefers YA novels and stays away from political/religious news, this book wasn’t for me.
Premise
The book takes place in the near future (around the year 2028). Several religious factions and powers exist throughout the world, some allied and some at odds. The world seems like it may be on the brink of a huge religious war.
The story follows Eliot Vanderthorpe Jr., the 27 year old son of and heir to Omni Science, a corporation that from my understanding has created a sort of future capitalistic google where people can search footage from all over the world and purchase premium footage/photos for a price. Eliot is a major screw up party boy who left his family to go on a major drug binge, isolating himself from his friends and ex-girlfriend Sarah.
After returning home and being put to work by his father, Eliot uses a super search in his father’s office and discovers that there is a man who looks exactly like him in California, in an area that regular Omni searches don’t pick up. He embarks on a search to discover who this person is and why he exists. All while trying to fix his negative reputation and relationship with those he cares about.
Review (Mild Spoilers)
This was the first “adult book” that I’ve completed in a long time. I mostly enjoy reading YA novels because I don’t really look to books as intellectual exercise machines but rather as fun ways to pass the time. After reading this book I realized why I don’t like adult books.
First of all, I felt like over half the time I had no idea what was going on. Even after finishing the book I didn’t have a complete picture of what the state of the world was and what exactly what going on with the waring religions. This was partly because my vocabulary isn’t as big as this book needed it to be, especially with it’s religious undertones, but also because I found myself getting bored when reading and skimmed certain passages.
Something that I complained about in the first half of the book was the fact that I felt as though most of the things being said to me as a reader weren’t actually important to the story. There were many “weird” scenes mentioned in the book that were in fact very entertaining but also not vital to the story. So when I got to scenes or paragraphs of text that weren’t entertaining in their weirdness, I got annoyed at being forced to read things that I didn’t actually care about.
I finished the book and had NO idea how I was supposed to feel. Though it might have been a result of me basically hating the protagonist the entire time.
Jenjenreviews 