Book Reviews

I recently read Suzanne Weyn's Empty. It's the sort of book you'd expect me to like - set in the near future, America is in the beginning stages of an oil crisis and three teenagers in one small town have to deal with the changes taking place in their lives. It's not a bad book, but I wouldn't recommend it either. It suffers a little from what I call "prechiness" and what other people call "preachiness". At any given moment there's a paragraph or two of random infodumping such as on page 41 when a random adult spends nine lines of dialogue just listing things made from oil. At any given moment someone is complaining that "someone should have seen this coming!" And while I'm all for environmentalism, a full paqe of technical specs on the Whippersnapper eco-friendly house is a little much. The book itself is on the short side - I read it in less than an hour - so long speeches and repetitive pontificating seem disproportionately long in comparison.

The biggest issue I had with the book is just that the bad things were talked about, but never seen. We hear about a fight over gas, but the POV character wasn't there for it. We hear about the wars in Venezuela and Bolivia, but no one in the town is apparently directly affected by this. We hear about riots at the grocery stores and gas stations, but never see more than a glimpse of the fallout. At the end there's a riot - which is averted before it starts. If you want me to believe the world is over, you gotta give me more than word of mouth to go on. Considering the book is divided into three POVs (Tom, Niki and Gwen) you'd think we'd be in the middle of all the action instead of skipping over it entirely.

I will say that the idea is a good one, I just wish she'd spent less time talking about it and more time showing the fallout.

Oh, and just a note, from someone who hates love triangles and can't stand sappy romance stories - the romance in this book was pretty well done.