Ooh, it made me heart sad, The Exploded View. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful, but absolutely sad (exception of first story about a Nice Guy™, which almost every woman in the world knows means he’s really a creep, although I guess while it fails the beautiful moniker, it’s still sad, since I’m sure if you asked creepy dude, he’d say he’s in love, not creepy at all.) And beautiful is wrong too — it isn’t vistas and sunsets, but beautiful in some other, intangible way that writing sometimes is when it’s describing sadness and potential and how we fail each other. The stories are all loosely tied together via a housing estate in South Africa (and by loose, I mean loose. Sometimes the tie is that the housing estate is off in the distance). And it ends with the looming threat of death, and the stories hang over you like that, days (months — I am so far behind in reviews) later. Death is overhanging me.

The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavić went on sale March 28, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It must be pleasant to have the world be all about you. In two ways, since All Our Wrongs Today, our protagonist Tom lives in a sort of utopia, which he manages, via time travel, to screw up with the result that what we have isn’t a technological utopia, but rather this, here, all around us. Yep, we had a 1960s future paradise, and then blammo! Trump (not explicitly but let’s throw him in there) and jerks and capitalism and poverty and auto-tuned pop songs all the time on the radio just because of Tom. Geez, Tom. What a schlub.

But, don’t fear. Even though our Tom is a schlub, he gets to have sex. Lots of sex. And he has a bunch of ex-girlfriends who he totally isn’t going to mention by name, but then again, here’s a list, and he probably also had sex with them too. Because it’s super super super super super important for this female reader to know that even though Tom is a self-admitted loser, he pulls man, he pulllllllls.

Side-boob anyone?

So we have an entertaining, sci-fi romp that I actually enjoyed reading and I’m not talking about the story or the science or the science-fiction, but the fiction that schlubby, self-admitted losers should get to have multiple universes/realities where they get to have sex with hot chicks (also intelligent — we’re made sure to notice that not only are the bone-buddies hot, they’re smart too).

Oh! But Tom having sex is a plot point that starts the whole destruction of the universe fans will tell me.

Yeah, well, I’m sure Elan Mastai could have figured out something else. He developed multiple theories of time travel in All Our Wrongs Today, he’s clever enough not to have major plot points hinging on some guy’s dick.

Good book, ruined for me because I’m not a heterosexual male who is titillated by good guys getting to have lots of sex.

All Our Wrongs Today by Elan Mastai went on sale February 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.