Akiva Reads

by Stuart Turton

Kinda dumb book that thinks it is exceedingly smart. I can and do enjoy dumb books that do what they say on the tin, but I got more and more annoyed as I went on in this one because Turton started getting more and more philosophical and sentimental, and it was just not as profound as he thought it was.

I love time travel shenanigans, so that was all right. I fucking hate body swapping as a concept, but I was ok with it here, and I think it's because a lot of the authorial choices take away the horror of it. They're none of them real, Aiden can't hurt them. Also does the thing that every body-swap book has to do and has one of the bodies be super fat and that's the horror, literally every paragraph for 70 pages contains a reference to how horrifying and disgusting and pathetic and disabling the body is. The speculative/fantasy parts were kind of a flop, I didn't get any sense of the society that would have created them, they were just convenient for telling the story Turton wanted to tell.

Forty thousand twists!