Defekt, by Nino Cipri

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.

My Goodreads Review

Finna, by Nino Cipri

The McGuffin in Finna is the hidden, perhaps confusing space that ends up leading to an alternate universe--I remember these well from Roger Zelazny, Seanan McGuire, C. S. Lewis (Narnia), etc etc. It lets you get a story going without a lot of complication, and that's what is done here. Finna is definitely a book for our times--these crappy service jobs probably pay $1 over minimum wage so they're *good* jobs, and you should be lucky to have one, you ingrate. A lot of reviewers complain about the characterization--I thought it was actually the good part, the characters grew on me a bit through the book. Maybe it's just a little densely packed.  There's some obvious motivation stated about why the missing grandma analog actually wants to come back to the crappy universe with our protagonists, but it seemed a bit cut off. Probably because it's the first in a series. Overall it's kind of lightweight, but it's fun and I'd probably read the next one.

My Goodreads Review