I really want to review this book but have struggled to write anything lately. I’m such a fan of Drew and want to throw my support his way, but I just can’t make the words come out. I’m clearly not going to reach my cannonball goal this year for the first time ever.
New goal: Half Cannonball!
I’ve been a big fan of Drew’s for a while. I loved The Hike, I liked The Postmortal, his annual Willams Sonoma takedown is always good for a few laughs. And his personal account of his brain hemorhage is one of the greatest pieces of writing I’ve read in the past few years. I wish him well and want to support him and his unique voice in any way I can.
I had to sit with this book for a while before I could figure out how I felt about it. I think I like parts of it A LOT. I would give half of this book 5 stars. But for some reason, the book as a whole didn’t really work for me.
From Amazon:
When the corporate monolith PortSys brought porting to the masses, CEO Emilia Kirsch and her son, Jason, accomplished what every other start-up company had failed to deliver.
They really did change the world. They reversed climate change. They created a multitrillion-dollar industry out of thin air, curing economic woes across the globe. They made it so that anyone could be anywhere simply by touching a screen…including the man who murdered Sarah Huff.
Now, Sarah’s 17-year-old sister, Anna, is determined to hunt the bastard down. But there are a few problems. She doesn’t know who the killer is or where in the world he may be at any given moment. Also, she’s stuck at prestigious Druskin Academy, where PortPhones are banned and any student who attempts to port off campus is immediately expelled.
It gets stickier. Anna’s also fallen in love with her dazzling new roommate, who just so happens to be Emilia Kirsch’s daughter, Lara. The dean of students wants Anna dead, perhaps literally. And she has only two friends to confide in; one is a reckless alcoholic and the other a bizarre fussbudget. Oh, and now she also needs to find Lara, who has mysteriously disappeared from campus.
Point B is the story of one clever and occasionally determined young woman seeking both love and vengeance but hardly ready for those two missions to intersect. It takes you to Vietnam, Hollywood, Singapore, Tokyo, inland Mexico, Oxford, the Maldives, Cuba, the coast of Northeast Australia, and all points beyond. You will find yourself plunged into a borderless, chaotic, oddly miraculous world that is ruled by a single bloodless corporation and by a family determined to keep it that way. PortSys never expected Anna Huff, and Anna Huff never expected love to make her this daring.
*******
Here’s what was great:
I loved the bits of the story that were told through Twitter-esque social media posts. People who wanted the world to know about the dark side of the porting industry, former employees of the PortSys company with an axe to grind, and enemies of the evil Kirsch (who were honestly, kind of Trumpy) family.
I really liked the idea that behind the walls of the exclusive, New England boarding school, life was business as usual. No porting allowed. Come to the school to learn. Leave all of the technology behind — that’s the way its worked for centuries, no need to change anything now. (Clearly, things didn’t go that way, but I did like the IDEA of it).
I enjoyed the fact that at no time did Magary ever try to explain porting or any science at all. Porting exists. That’s all we need to know! Want to have lunch in Budapest? Port. Is your job in Hong Kong but your apartment is in Maryland? Port. Want to take a selfie at the top of Mount Everest? Port!
I loved the supporting characters: Bamert, Asmi, Mrs. Ludwig, and Burton were all really well-fleshed out and interesting, and I loved learning more about their backgrounds and what drove them to their actions.
And here’s where my gripes with the story lay:
Unfortunately, I didn’t feel much at all for Anna and Lara. I just didn’t believe that Anna was capable of half of the crap she ended up doing (the scene in Cuba? NO.) and that Lara — who may have been beautiful — was worth any of the effort. BUT. I am glad that the two main characters were women and was rooting for their romance.
A lot of the criticism that I had for Magary’s previous two books was about his inability to have believable female characters. His “protagonist” in The Postmortal was such an annoying “bro” that I wondered if he was even capable of writing a strong female character. The good news is, yes, he can. The bad news was that I just didn’t like Anna that much.
The Kirsch family was sickening. Their abuse of power and their self-serving actions were just abhorrent. The physical torture that Jason puts Lara through, the emotional and psychological manipulation that Emilia takes out on everyone around her, and the way that they use their money and status to do whatever they want were not really what I wanted to read about right now. The more that I think about it, the more Trump-esque they seemed. I get why Magary would want to fictionalize them and make them look like assholes, but…a book about teleporting should be more of a break from reality, you know?
In addition, this book was self-published and the editing was…weird? Strange that Magary would need to self-publish, right? There were formatting issues and grammatical errors which really took me out of the story sometimes.
I will still continue to read anything Magary writes (although, I have not subscribed to the Defector yet). I still think about the ending to The Hike all the time, and that crab will always have a special place in my heart. Any guy that could write a character like that is ok with me.
SIDE NOTE: If you know anything about Drew Magary, do yourself a favor and read the reviews for this book on Amazon. Lots of mayonnaise and robe jokes.