Everything You Ever Wanted, by Luiza Sauma

I'm going to give this a 3.5 and round up. There's a lot to appreciate in this book. The author's description of our protagonist's (Iris Cohen) life is the perfect buildup to her decision to emigrate to Nyx. She leads an apparently privileged (she has a job that pays enough for her to live decently and party) but absolutely hellish (meaningless work, meaningless relationships, drinks hard and eats horribly because all her friends do and then feels awful later) life. She hates what she does and it seems like an endless treadmill. Her family relationships are not enough to keep her there. Though she would have liked them to be. So off she goes.

The world of Nyx seems artificially constrained in a way that makes it feel like it's fake. Sauma spends no time explaining the science at all, just says one gets there through a wormhole and briefly describes what it looks like. It's all about what Iris goes through. The participants are weirdly cut off--they can (and are required to) post about their lives on social media, but they are not allowed contact with Earth and so never get feedback on what they are doing.

You keep waiting for the book to relent, and it never does. Once the perspective shifts fully to Nyx, the situation just grinds all the participants down until everyone is dead. Iris is hopeful at the beginning, Nyx seems to strip away all the distractions that kept her from having a good life. But the social media and livestream lose support and eventually the colony goes downhill. One expects a reveal or a rescue and it never happens. At the end I reflected on the book and it made me incredibly sad. It also reminded me of the early American colonies--some ended exactly this way, and for most it was a one-way trip with little to no contact with those they left behind..

The writing is excellent and I feel like I understand Iris. It's not a book to lift your spirits but it's worthwhile.

My Goodreads Review