No One Is Talking About This

↻ 2025-01-06

I like Lockwood’s voice. She’s funny, she’s got a literate magic about her work on what is a very prosaic topic (social media content creation).

The first half of the book is all style. It sets the scene for what, in the second half of the book, becomes a story about birth and love and, perhaps, “what matters”.

I love the first half. I was worried that the first half of the book would be the whole book, and that the book would be nothing but a stylistic conceit. That didn’t occur. The book veers from style into literary metaphor in the second half, which is much more serious.

That turn into a real story is of mixed effectiveness, however. Yes, there’s a thread here, of a lady who has a nonsense job (influencer) in a world gone mad (short form social media) and has begun to unravel in real life. That thread then tries to lodge itself into the real-world condition of a short-form life, a child born with birth defects which ensure it will not live long.

The relationship works at a glance, and it isn’t poorly written, but I’m not sure it is of great literary value, either, and I think Lockwood could do better, as skilled as she is with word magic.

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