Desuetude

I really enjoyed this story. It had me entertained and it was a quick read. I was fascinated with the fact that this could be how our future looks especially the part where technology plays a big role and we could get consumed by it. This is definitely not a HEA book but weirdly enough I was ok with it. It seemed a fitting way to go for the FMC and I didn’t even see it coming. I also enjoyed that I share a name with the protagonist, that never happens to me so I loved to see it here.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this e-ARC.

This is a sort of old-fashioned novella, which has a feel of a mid-sixties sci-fi magazine lead story - the kind of thing I devoured in anthologies as a kid. The story is simple, it's the future and our protagonist Val is an exterminator, though more like a big game hunter, who gets called in when mutated creatures on the edge of the city start to attack. Except in this future, there is almost no edge of the city left, everything is being flattened and built over (it's illegal to own undeveloped land, or at least it incurs a lot of tax). Val is an analog woman in a digital world, she barely uses her augmented reality and at one point is ticketed for driving manually. It is a well-painted if extremely satirical future, and runs the risk of tiptoeing into "old man shouting at cloud" territory, but whilst Val disapproves of the lack of connection and choices around this online future, it luckily doesn't succumb to a conservative blur. Instead, that feeling of the sixties is summoned up again, it is not something to necessarily get angry about, rather it's just a shame - a bit like the ending of Silent Running. And as the story builds to its inevitable climax, it satisfies in a rather classical way.