Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

really good propaganda can alter the way you think about issues without you hardly noticing. It can slip new modes of thinking into your mind, and make you think they were your ideas. This book is not good propaganda. I'm a fairly ideal audience for a book like this--very down for feminist books, very down for time travel and alternate history, and even pretty down for anarchist philosophy and history. And even for me, the absolute lack of subtlety, complexity, or basic character work was too exhausting to push past by the halfway mark. Every male character is a rapist or racist or lecher (unless they're an oppressed minority, in which case they're allowed to be bland and forgettable); every female character is a saint of fierce, deep sisterhood; every event undergone by a character we're supposed to sympathize with is bursting with depths of meaning and feeling; every experience of someone the author doesn't want us to like is superficial, simplistic, and usually sinister. In the author's defense--the book opens with a 90s riot grrrl concert where a band plays with lyrics about racist cops sucking plastic dicks, and bad bitches being amazing and generally screaming against the concepts of subtlety or complexity. So if that tone is any indication, the book is probably not at all attempting to be anything but cotton candy revenge fantasy propaganda. But that's not anything that I think is helpful to any of the causes it's trying to help, so it's a skip for me.