Book Notices | Summer Frost by Blake Crouch / The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz / The Answer is No by Frederik Backman

Blake Crouch, Summer Frost

Amazon   Blake Crouch's Summer Frost is a an entertaining short read about a not-too-distant future in which artificial intelligence has the potential to become life, or at least to approximate it very closely. So what happens when an NPC in a video game strays from its programming? Well, Crouch has come up with a readable account of one potential outcome.

Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

Amazon   I read and enjoyed Jean Hanff Korelitz's book The Plot back in 2021 (my review), but by the time this sequel came along, I had to refresh my memory: A professor of writing steals a killer plot from a dead student to write his own bestseller, and trouble ensues because the plot wasn't all that fictional. And the bad guy in that book was...well, I had to be reminded of that too, but I won't give it away here. Okay, so the protagonist of The Sequel is—I'm trying hard here not to spoil the plot of either book—someone who's done a lot of bad things in the past and who racks up more of them in this book. This character is presented as a sort of Tom Ripley, the eponymous antihero of Patricia Highsmith's series that started with The Talented Mr. Ripley: Tom is a complex character who winds up having to commit a number of murders, but usually for understandable reasons. Despite disapproving of his behavior, readers are invested enough to root for him and worry that he may not get away with it. So Korelitz sets out to create her own Tom Ripley. (In fact, that professor from the first book taught writing at Ripley College.) Unfortunately, it just didn't work for me. Unlike Tom, Korelitz's protagonist is unlikable and unsympathetic and, for a supposedly clever criminal, makes a lot of stupid mistakes. Nor is the book suspenseful. The story just rolls forward from one unlikely scenario to another without ever creating any buildup of tension, at least for me. Not the worst book in the world by any means, but only a so-so sequel after The Plot, which seemed for a time to be a darling of the book world.

Frederk Backman, The Answer is No

Amazon   This Amazon Original Story by Frederik Backman is about a happy loner named Lucas who just wants to continue to live his peaceful, solitary existence. Unfortunately, he is dragged into the politics of his apartment building by a series of unrealistically quirky characters. The plot is unrealistic too, and kind of stupid, and just in general the whole thing is trying too hard to be cute. It wound up just being cloying and irritating. Imagine Gilmore Girls in book form but even more annoying.