⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 Stars – A solid bit of speculative fiction and well read audiobook.
Format: Audiobook (via BorrowBox)
Read: June 2024
I picked this up at random after trawling what was available for loan in my Library through the BorrowBox app (love the free audiobooks, hate how hard to browse the app is). The cover and the title caught my attention, and the description landed in my audiobook sweet spot of “sounds interesting but not enough that I might want to make notes on it.”
To my surprise this had me hooked from the first chapter! The plot is very “Black Mirror” and imagines a world in which technology company Imagen has developed virtual reality available as a small device you hook on your ear which interfaces directly with your brain. This allows you to explore a virtual world – Make-Believe – directed entirely by your own imagination. As you might – er – imagine this addictive, but to combat negative effects usage is limited to 2 hours per day.
Cassie is an ex-employee of Imagen, fired from her marketing job and banned from Make-Believe for her addiction, after she was somehow able to exceed the 2 hour limit (thereby breaking the terms of service). She meets Lewis, another cut off Make-Believe addict, and the story goes from there.
Cassie was well fleshed out as a character. As a shakily recovering addict drowning in debt she is at times desperate, manipulative and not particularly likeable, but the circumstances that led to her addiction were sympathetic. The reasons for her losing her job and severity of the terms are immediately suspicious, I have to wonder why she didn’t question things herself earlier, but then she was in the grip of addiction and the shame was definitely used against her.
Most of the time the reader is with Cassie, but occasionally will switch to the POV of another character who has just interacted with her. I liked this technique because it gave her more dimension, and really helped get across what a mess she is when in Make-Believe.
I did find the first half of the book stronger than the latter. Some things were easy to see coming, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with where the plot went but I did I like how the unreliability of Cassie’s point of view was played with.
It’s not Great Literature, or even especially original, but it’s relatively rare that an audiobook will grip me like this one did, Kristin Atherton also did a fantastic job narrating (note to myself to look for more with her), so while this is more of a 3.5 I’ll round up on my own enjoyment!
REVIEW SUMMARY
I LIKED
- The possibilities with a technology like Make-Believe (good and bad) are intruiging.
- The story remains grounded in Cassie’s personal experience.
- The “zoom out” POV chapters where we see an outside perspective on Cassie was a good way to give her more dimension.
I DIDN’T LIKE
- First half was stronger, the resolution felt a bit anticlimactic… But arguably also more realistic that way!
