Teel's Reviews > Soft Apocalypse

OMG, so much better than Parable of the Sower(/Talents), by Octavia Butler, despite so many similarities in the scope & type of tragedies & journeys they detailed. This book had all the pain and misery and horrors and multiplying levels of humanity being its own worst enemy, but without being so relentlessly grim or turning into torture porn. In fact, despite all the monstrous, painful, difficult things going on in this book, I thought the tone stayed refreshingly light & maintained an appropriate sense of humor.

I've been looking at other people's reviews & a lot of people didn't seem to understand the jumps forward in time between chapters, when it was obvious within 2 or 3 of them that this book only details Jasper's relationships; their beginnings and endings, mostly. The book isn't about the end of the world, it's really about one man's attempts to find companionship - and if you're someone who has gone through the sort of emotional journey Jasper finds himself on with respect to relationships with the opposite sex, it will be no trouble to become deeply engaged by these characters and their lives. Of course, it being the case that the book does not show the parts of Jasper's life where he does not have a significant emotional relationship with another person, does the end of the book (& the book ending where it did) imply that his & Phoebe's fears about Doctor Happy are true?

Yes: violence, language, sex, & death. Also: life, love, family, & hope. Outside of the sometimes-too-light-in-tone YA dystopias I've been reading, Soft Apocalypse has been the lightest in tone I've found. Refreshingly frank & honest about a real possibility for global decline, while being refreshingly free of the dark, gritty, grimness of other dystopian fiction.