RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAn excellent demonstration of her gifts as a novelist: it is inventive, fast-paced, and deeply concerned with difficult journeys to self-discovery, as well as the transformative costs of such adventures ... Transformational ... Strongly recommended.
Neal Stephenson
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn addition to its bigness, Fall is also, on the whole, Stephenson’s most entertaining work since Anathem (2008) ... a work of high fantasy that very much knows it is a work of fantasy ... Neither the Moab nor Ameristan plots serve much purpose in the novel except to show that Elmo Shepherd and Fox News viewers are bad people with either too much money or too much ammunition — or both. Further, Shepherd suffers from mental illness; too often in Fall, \'crazy\' and \'evil\' are conflated. What’s missing from both parts of Fall is the dense examination of such cultural divides that we see in Snow Crash (1992), Anathem, or the last section of Seveneves (2015): the visit to Ameristan is especially frustrating as it promises, but does not much deliver, the kind of incisive social commentary that Stephenson often engages in. That said, his musings on dental and medical care in a world that rejects science, and the precarious state of infrastructures no longer maintained but instead used for target practice, show Stephenson’s typical nuance and humor ... the novel asks us to consider questions about reality, memory, life and death, and the potential for digital life expansion, but its characters don’t ponder such questions in much depth ... Stephenson’s tremendous gift for envisioning future technological praxis is shown in Fall through his speculation ... Stephenson’s latest work is less than the sum of its parts, due to lack of genuine tension in the novel’s final third.
