You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you sometimes can by its title: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits tells you almost everything you need to know. It’s over-the-top, ultra-violent, often ridiculous, and very, very fun.
We first meet Zoey through the eyes of a serial killer; he’s watching her through the window of her mother’s trailer, waiting for the best moment to grab her. He’s not really waiting for a moment when her guard is down, he’s timing it for the best audience reaction.
In the probably-too-near-to-be-comfortable future, social media has reached the point of total, round-the-clock-coverage of everyone’s life. It’s not a Big Brother situation; people do it to themselves, on purpose. Most people have cameras in their sunglasses, or their collar, or their hair, and everything they see is uploaded to Blink. Complicated algorithms (translation: technology that’s never explained because we don’t need to know and we don’t care anyway) can pinpoint the most interesting stuff going on, so people are either uploading to Blink, or watching Blink, or both, constantly.
I’m sure you missed the fact that the book is poking fun at today’s social media situation, because it’s very subtle. Het hem.
But, just like today, there’s always people who think social media is pretty silly, and they don’t participate in it much, like Zoey. Which is a shame, because if she’d been paying attention to the feeds she might have seen the serial killer sneaking up on her.
Luckily for her, she’s found by some of the people who worked for her father, who was recently murdered by a techno-enhanced psychopath soon after he (her father) wrote the will that left all his money to Zoey, before the psychopath could steal the secret to unlimited god-like superpower.
So yes, it gets complicated fairly early on.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how far in the future we are. Holographic Christmas displays and cars that can drive themselves are common, but we’re not quite to the point of replicators and transporters. I got the idea that a lot of the extravagantly futuristic things could actually exist today, if you have obscene amounts of money, which Zoey’s father does. Well, did, until he was messily murdered. Now it’s Zoey’s money, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want it, since it comes with all her father’s enemies.
At times the story is literally exhausting. It’s what my sister calls “wretched excess.” After the first few buildings are blown up and the body count gets into the triple digits you start to feel like maybe you need a break. But before you can put the book down you get a peek into the life of the ultra-rich that a lot of us dream about: bodyguards that appear at my elbow with whatever clothes or gadgets I could possibly want? Why certainly. Gourmet meals of any kind at any hour of the day? Don’t mind if I do. A luxurious bed in the center of an Olympic-sized pool surrounded by floating candles? Now you’re getting silly. But I’m not saying no.
It’s not that Zoey doesn’t want all that money, exactly, it’s that she doesn’t want everything that goes along with it: as far as she’s concerned, obscenely rich people are weird. They’re so different from her they might as well be a different species. They want weird things, they think nothing of spending more on one toy than a small county makes in a year, and they stopped caring about anybody outside their own demographic a billion dollars ago.
I’m sure you also missed the fact that the book is poking fun at the super wealthy, because that’s very subtle as well. Het hem.
(In case you think I’m bashing the book, I’m absolutely not. It never pretends to be anything other than what it is: a dark, hilarious, smash-everything-and-throw-money-at-the-survivors adventure. But in between the explosions and extravagance the author makes some surprisingly subtle points, and the dialogue is always clever.)
Zoey feels bad about her weight, and her chipped teeth, and the fact that she never went to college, but she tries very hard not to do two things: wallow in self-pity, or blame anyone else for the things she doesn’t like about herself, and she won’t put up with that crap from anyone else either.
She’s secretly afraid all these weird rich people really are better than she is, but she covers it up with some brilliantly sarcastic remarks: you can watch her targets get whiplash trying to figure out if they should be insulted or impressed.
So she’s better able than most to have a mountain of money dumped on her and not have it go to her head. However, the huge crowds of insane, over-funded, hyper-enhanced super criminals out for her blood is enough to make anybody feel a little picked on.
The story is straightforward (figure out what the bad guys want and keep them from getting it while not getting killed and maybe learn something about yourself if you survive) though there are a few plot twists. One of them is the most straightforward kind of plot twist: a character died that I thought was safe. They die quickly, with no warning and little fanfare, and I didn’t see it coming. I like when a book can surprise me like that.
The resolution is a little on the deus ex machina side (almost literally) but at the same time it fit with everything else in the book: anything in this near-future world is possible, as long as you have enough money and aren’t too concerned with the body count.
This was definitely one of those books that you end up reading way past your bedtime, because you keep saying “Okay, I’ll just read to the end of this chapter and go to bed….well, maybe I’ll read to the end of the next chapter..” If you like snappy comebacks, future tech, lots of explosions, and you have a sense of humor, you’ll like this one.