🍍🍍🍍 3/5 Pineapples – The cli-fi dystopic setting was cool, and it’s funny but I found it had nothing to say.
Read: Feb 2025
Format: Kindle
This book was on my TBR lists for so long! It’s exactly the sort of thing that is right up my street – dark humour, a touch of speculative fiction (climate fiction in this case, cli-fi if you will) and a slightly unhinged protagonist. Also, this is written by a New Zealand author and set in New Zealand which is fun, I usually enjoy a bit of Kiwi humour.
Well, this is funny and I did enjoy Alice’s POV. She’s kind of bitchy and manipulative, and unhinged to the degree that she has a full imaginary friend. She’s got a genius-level IQ but she’s wasted her potential in crappy jobs, and now in her late thirties that is starting to weigh on her. When the hot rich guy she hooks up with dumps his fifteen-year-old daughter on her, with a fat stack of cash for her trouble, it shakes up her life in more ways than one.
I also really enjoyed (maybe not enjoyed, was terrified this is far too possible) the future world where the planet is fucked, a bottle of beer costs $30 and all the rich people (wealthugees) are buying their way into New Zealand. The majority of the population barely scrapes by with food prices astronomically high and the infrastructure is going to shit, meanwhile the rich build themselves walled-off green paradises.
This did start strong but once Erika’s secret was revealed it all quickly fell apart for me. That plot felt very juvenile (and full of holes), but maybe I could have gone with it if I felt like the novel had anything to say. I got to the end of it and just thought “What was the point of any of this?” Alice didn’t seem to have grown or learned anything, and nothing had significantly changed. If anything, everything is now even worse in her life. There are a lot of dangling threads of potential and I think this could have worked if the writing and the character dynamics (especially with her mother) had been sharper.
Ironically this whole novel to me was like Alice’s genuis IQ – wasted potential! Maybe that was the point…?
It reminds me of Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is better and much more memorable than this.
REVIEW SUMMARY
I LIKED
- It’s dark and funny, and it did make me laugh.
- The climate-fiction element felt timely and grimly plausible.
- I enjoyed Alice as a character.
I DIDN’T LIKE
- It just didn’t go anywhere and I have no idea what the point was.
