...[a] chilling dystopian tale ... With its focus on the vitality of communication and human interactions, Dalcher’s tale is a fresh and terrifying contribution to the burgeoning subgenre about women-focused dystopias spearheaded by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
When does a publishing trend give voice to our anxieties, and when does it merely exploit those anxieties? ... That’s the uncomfortable question I kept asking myself as I read Christina Dalcher’s Vox, the latest novel to give us a fully inflated misogynist nightmare ... Unfortunately, the novel’s most interesting ideas are quickly muzzled. Almost as soon as Vox pivots from exposition to action, it loses its edge. It shifts from a sharp work of feminist speculative fiction to a frothy thriller ... Vox never plumbs the depths of its clever foundation.
Christina Dalcher’s Vox is the latest in a rush of feminist speculative novels, and like most of them begins at the terrifying end of the spectrum ... At the two-thirds mark, Vox morphs from a glum prophecy into a Hollywood-style thriller ... the whole novel beggars belief, and maybe that’s the point ... If Dalcher wants to scare people into waking up, she would do better to send them back to the history books, rather than forward into an overblown, hastily imagined future.
Vox (Berkley, 324 pp., 2.5 out of 4 stars) is heavy with backstory and flashback, about a third of it spent setting the stage. The best parts of the novel are actually in this slow-moving first section, when the potential is more or less intact ... Dalcher's premise is intriguing, especially in the hands of a linguistics expert, and it provides a good deal of momentum ... Then, the author rushes through the interesting bits in favor of a thin, clumsily constructed thriller plot ... Not uninteresting, but ultimately unaffecting.
At first glance, Dalcher’s novel seems so laughably far-fetched that it’s almost hard to open up ... Ultimately, Christina Dalcher, who like her story’s protagonist is also a linguist, is a good writer. Her message and the points she raises are incredibly important, but the execution falls a bit short ... Much of the story is entertaining and thought-provoking ... overall it falls a bit flat, struggling to execute and to entertain at times.
There are welcome glimmers of insight in the narrative ... first-time novelist Dalcher has a background in linguistics, and the story sometimes gets bogged down in technical jargon ... the ending of the novel, while surprising, is rushed, unearned, and the least convincing part of a story that continually challenges the reader’s suspension of disbelief ... Dalcher’s premise is tantalizing, but the execution of her thought experiment...quickly devolves into the stuff of workaday thrillers.
...[a] provocative debut ... Dalcher’s narrative raises questions about the links between language and authority ... The novel’s muddled climax and implausible denouement fail to live up to its intriguing premise.
