The world really needed an anti-capitalist Ikea parody, and we knew it, and Nino Cipri really delivers. I thought the first book was a good try, and worthy of encouragement. This one is pretty darn solid, though I'm a little confused by it. I'll come back to that.
Here we revisit Derek, the LitenVarld employee who has totally drunk the Kool-Ade and has no life outside the store. This book explains why he is living in a shipping container in the LitenVarld parking lot. He meets many versions of himself (herself/themselves) working for LitenVarld as Special Employees, charged with wrangling/eliminating defecta--experimental furniture that has gained consciousness and mobility.I thoroughly enjoyed the book, it builds on the first one without really depending on it. I would recommend reading Finna first, in part because if you read Defekt then Finna will suffer a bit by comparison, and it doesn't deserve to. But they don't depend on each other, which is weird. Finna definitely ends with several plot points untidied--it absolutely reads like a first book in a series. But in Defekt's acknowledgements Cipri says he never intended to write a sequel. Really? Maybe he meant it--he still hasn't written the sequel to Finna because Defekt is not that. It's set in the same LitenVerse and builds on the foundation of Finna, but those dangling plots are not continued. Derek has moved on. So now I don't know what he does with that first one.
These are tremendously fun and trenchant books to read, am looking forward to more as long as Cipri has ideas to explore there.
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