The Only Book I Have Ever Hated

    I have never hated a book before. (Except If I Ever Get Out of Here, but that was solely for its completely random ending.) I always try to find the best in every single author's work, but this time, I'm sapped. This book was just flat-out ridiculous. 

    The Heart Goes Last commences sometime in the near future -- we obviously don't know when -- with the United States in complete economic collapse. Most don't have a job and have resorted to crime to get by; the stock market has collapsed; you can't leave your home for sake of being robbed; and thousands are foreclosed. And it's no different for our main characters, Stan and Charmaine. Fired from their previous employments and living in their car off of tips from Charmaine's job at a bar, they spend every waking second hoping and praying they make it through the next 24 hours ... so that they can keep hoping and praying the next day. One dreary day, Charmaine is at work, when she sees an ad for a possible solution to her and Stan's sad reality on the bar's TV. The ad featured a place called Consilience, with bright, green grass, actual food (unlike the stale coffee and sandwiches they have been living off as of late), recreational activities, large, suburban houses, and so much more. 

    It seems perfect for her and Stan! The only drawback is for every month you spend in the perfect heaven that is Consilience, you spend another in the town's less picture-perfect counterpart, Positron. Positron is the town's jail; you have to spend a month there to give back to your community and make sure everything -- meaning all the residents -- stay in line. No big deal, right? A Consilience resident will switch with their Alternate by the month. When you're in Consilience, your Alternate is in Positron, and when you're in Positron, your Alternate is in Consilience. You also have different jobs between Consilience and Positron. Your Positron job will most likely be something mundane, like working at a bakery, but at Consilience, you put in actual work towards your community. That might mean taking out the trash, community service, volunteering ... or something much, much worse. And as the cherry on top, once you're in this perfect, gated community, you can't leave.

    I don't know about you, but Charmaine is more than ready to spend six months in jail and six months in perfect suburban heaven. Somehow, she gets Stan (who is the grumpiest person to exist) to agree, and before they know it, they've signed the papers and are officially residents of Positron/Consilience. Everything is going well enough; in Charmaine's Consilience life, she tells Stan she's in "medical" (hint: she's not) and in Positron, she works at a bakery. As for Stan, he has always thought Charmaine is the most boring woman alive. He married her for that reason -- his words exactly -- as he was tired of having a complicated love life, but Positron/Consilience is choking him from the inside out. In Positron, he's in IT, and in Consilience, he takes care of chickens. So interesting. 

    Everything is going as well as it possibly can until Charmaine falls in love with her Alternate. Well, more specifically, she doesn't fall in love with him; she just got tired of Stan, which is why she starts cheating on him. She tells him she's going to the bakery, but she's actually meeting up with her quasi-Dimmesdale in the sketchy, abandoned parts of town. One day, she slips up. She leaves a risqué note for the guy she's cheating on her husband with -- Max, his name is -- under the fridge, as he's her alternate, and Stan just happens to find it. She's not dumb, though; she signed it with the alias Jasmine, not Charmaine. And as I said earlier, Stan is bored with Charmaine. He's shocked to find the note -- Charmaine is cheating on me?!?!? -- but he's even more mystified with the nonexistent Jasmine. Jasmine signed the note in elegant cursive, kissed it in fuschia lipstick, and signed it off with XOXO. Charmaine wears plaid, pressed, pastel clothes, paints her nails beige, and is an obsessive cleaner. He doesn't want someone like Charmaine; he wants Jasmine. 

    Before he knows it, he's in love with her. 

    At this point, I was like, Okay, the only way this book will go is up, but I was so wrong. I was so, so wrong. The book started off as a dystopia with tons of potential -- heck, any dystopia that starts off in the near future with an economic collapse has potential -- but somewhere in the weeds, it went WAY south. (Readers: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!! I'm really very sorry but I've been thinking about this nonstop for the last week and have not told a single soul yet, so if you are convinced you're going to read this book, just skip the last part of this paragraph. Anyway, as I was saying.) After the dystopia, there was the Charmaine/Stan/Max thing; then, somehow, Max's wife got involved. After that, we learned of Charmaine's true profession, which is something I won't say for the sake of the treacherous reader that is still reading, and we're then exposed to the huge human trafficking ring that is Consilience. And after that, we're exposed to Elvis robots that are built to do unspeakable things and a medical procedure that drugs someone into falling in love with you. Among other things. (Okay, you may resume reading now.) 

    Needless to say, I was HORRIFIED after the three-hundred-forty-five pages that comprised this monstrosity. Dearest reader, I even went as far as composing a list of everything I hate about this book. You're welcome: 

1. The WEIRD plot (and elements; I think that Atwood reached into a magician's hat of the most horrible things she could think of and somehow incorporated them all into this mess) 
2. The POORLY DEVELOPED characters 
3. The fact that it was written by Margaret Atwood, THE author of The Handmaiden's Tale, the forefront of dystopia today 
4. Seven words: How does someone even think of this? 

     I'm amused and terrified at the same time. Charmaine is such a flimsy character; she has no personality, she's not weird or strange or superbly funny, and while her problems keep growing over the course of the novel -- you might want to skip this part again, treasured reader, but at one point she thought she killed Stan -- she's not very deep. At all. And Stan ... I don't even know about Stan. I feel as though if I start talking about Stan, I'll explode. I mean, if we're in the future, I would expect better things from the main characters; since humanity has been able to create robots that do horrible things and medical procedures to completely take away one's agency, then they could surely afford to make a personality improver or something. 

    Also, really quick, this is Margret Atwood. MARGRET. ATWOOD. I expected much, much better things from her! In fact, I selected this book from the library because I saw the big "ATWOOD" on the spine and thought, Oh, this must be good! Why? I don't know. All I know is, this book is ridiculous. I don't recommend you read it. You might be thinking, "Oh, she hates the book just because it has a few funny plot elements and the characters are a little weird? What if it's supposed to be like that?" and I guess you have a point. Dystopians are supposed to make you scared, all Is our world heading in this direction? but I can tell you, it is most certainly not. Our economy might collapse, but no. Just no. (At least, I hope not.) 

    The one positive of this book? The writing. Even if the plot is pure trash, and the characters leave too much to be desired, Margaret Atwood is still the one behind the words. The most boring scenes are crafted expertly, some in the past tense, some in the present, and while I hated -- HATED -- the characters, I found myself sympathizing with them. (That is, until Stan fell in love with the completely fake character his wife was around the guy she was cheating on him with.) When the narrator was describing the thoughts of Charmaine, the phrasing was simple, clean, plain. When Stan was being narrated, it was more Rabelisian and featured an expletive or two. I almost felt like I was in the story, like I was experiencing Positron and Consilience, and I guess I must admit -- I even grew a little worried about the future of our world like one is supposed to with dystopias. 

    And then I remembered the trash plot, and I concluded that if you're thinking about reading this book, just don't. 

- Simrah