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map_of_the_worldI really, really liked this book. The writing wasn't brilliant, in fact not remarkable at all and in places it was quite stodgy but the ideas carried it through. At its baseline its another book about difference and otherness, about how do we treat people who are different from us and how should we treat people who are different from us. the basic premise is that teenagers who die are coming back to life and how they and the larger society deals with that. The author draws parallels with lots of groups of oppressed people but he doesn't do it clumsily or in an overly didactic way.
There were a lot of really interesting almost sidelines wrapped up in the main plot, the ones that stood out to me were that we live in a world that moves really fast and is full of junk chemicals and that maybe changing us physically and so changing what it means to be human,
Also there is an awesome critique of how we live in a society that sees the road to social change is through conspicuous consumerism
But mostly although the main protagonist is not of the group of people in the book being Othered the author really seems to get under the skin of those being othered, and really understands the subtleties and complexities of being part of an oppressed group. There are some really interesting discussions in the book over language and naming, who gets to use what language and weather oppressed groups using language that the oppressor group used against them is a reclamation or a capitualtion. There's also a really interesting dialogue sequence about passing, and the politics of passing and weather the dead teens want to pass and the assumption by alive people that they should want to pass.
While this book could have come off as clumsy and heavy and preachy it didn't because apart from the obvious conceit of the dead coming back to life, the characters and situations are believable and well drawn. All of the characters including the main antagonist are complex and have sympathetic, if not particularly, likable reasons for their actions and prejudices
There were a lot of really interesting almost sidelines wrapped up in the main plot, the ones that stood out to me were that we live in a world that moves really fast and is full of junk chemicals and that maybe changing us physically and so changing what it means to be human,
Also there is an awesome critique of how we live in a society that sees the road to social change is through conspicuous consumerism
But mostly although the main protagonist is not of the group of people in the book being Othered the author really seems to get under the skin of those being othered, and really understands the subtleties and complexities of being part of an oppressed group. There are some really interesting discussions in the book over language and naming, who gets to use what language and weather oppressed groups using language that the oppressor group used against them is a reclamation or a capitualtion. There's also a really interesting dialogue sequence about passing, and the politics of passing and weather the dead teens want to pass and the assumption by alive people that they should want to pass.
While this book could have come off as clumsy and heavy and preachy it didn't because apart from the obvious conceit of the dead coming back to life, the characters and situations are believable and well drawn. All of the characters including the main antagonist are complex and have sympathetic, if not particularly, likable reasons for their actions and prejudices
