‘VOX portrays a horrifying future.’
Summary
You won’t recognise the America that is introduced in this story. Christian values are taken out of context and embedded in the law, completely oppressing and silencing all women. Women can no longer hold jobs, girls are no longer taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words a day, but now women only have one hundred to make themselves heard. Our main character Jean still can’t believe it, and fears what the future might hold for her and her daughter. So when she’s offered a deal by no other than the president, she knows exactly what she wants as payment: she wants her freedom of speech back. But the deal contains some shady parts and a lot of small print. Jean soon finds herself not only risking her and her daughters freedom, but also the freedom of all females in this new America.
Review
I’m sorry, it breaks my heart to tell you that this book was just another let-down for me. Don’t get me wrong, Christina Dalcher did great on the dystopian part: a horrible future is being portrayed in this book, a future I definitely wouldn’t want to experience myself. But the rest of the book was just very mediocre to me, sometimes even unsatisfactory.
What ‘annoyed’ me most were the characters. I’d expected more depth and secrets and lies and complications, but all the characters just ended up bland and spineless. Even the main character – I mean, we always get to know the main character in a special, more intimate way – showed no particular characteristics, which made this whole book so uninteresting to read, oops! (And all that she did tell me about herself just annoyed me on a whole new level, but I guess that’s a personal opinion).
Now, I’d also like to share some thoughts about the plot of VOX. This story-idea had a lot of potential, and it felt like the author tried to take bits of every outcome and glued them together to form some sort of story. It was just highly confusing, is all I wanna say. There were a lot of twists I didn’t see coming – which isn’t particularly a bad thing, were they properly woven into the story, but that wasn’t the case.
Conclusion
So, VOX wasn’t for me. But as I said earlier, it did do a great job portraying a horrifying future. So, for that, I’ll give the book a 2-bookies rating. In general, this story was just super confusing and the characters were kind of bland. Still, if you’re looking for an original dystopian novel, I’d recommend VOX to you.
| Product information: |
| Written by: Christina Dalcher |
| Pages: 352 |
| Publisher: Berkley – Penguin Books |
| ISBN: 0440000815 |
| Interested? Buy the book here |