A Better World

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
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Summary / Annotation

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

As good as the first volume submitted by eknapp on September 6, 2016, 3:11pm Book 2 sees hero Nick Cooper drafted by the new president into an advisory role, for which he is scorned and shunned by the rest of the administration who see him as an upjumped pawn. This president is weak, easily manipulated by his gifted-fearing, war-hawking inherited council, and Cooper struggles to keep the country from tilting into civil war.

Meanwhile, an abnorm terrorist group created by chessmaster John Smith is burning norms alive, disrupting food distribution, and manipulating the government into one self-destructive misstep after another (detention camps, forcibly microchipping its own citizens, invading its own cities).

The depictions of different gifted experiences are wonderful: a brilliant assassin who perceives time at one-eleventh normal speed (which makes him powerful but also makes human interaction torture); a simple family man who merely gives highly accurate estimates; a woman who’s memetic (plus I learned a new word, hooray!) Sakey excels at exploring ways in which savantism might be expressed and then considering the entirety of the gift, drawbacks as well as advantages, and how it would color perception and personality.

My one big complaint is Sakey’s failure to justify the president’s idiocy. When his plot calls for oppressive action on the part of the US government, his bad advisors make a bunch of obvious fear-mongering assertions, and the good ones make a few contrivedly weak ones. These are flawed moments in an otherwise gripping, zooming, captivating novel.