A Song for a New Day by Sarah PinskerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's pretty amazing that Sarah Pinsker wrote this before it became a documentary. OTOH, as predictions go it is not so difficult--mass shootings were our big concern when she wrote this, and it was widely acknowledged that a pandemic of some kind was going to happen in the near future. But the timing of my reading it is insanely on target, which made it sad to read even though the book itself is not a sad one. It's actually a very hopeful book, showing us how we might resist a relatively benevolent public-private partner dictatorship (I wonder if she deliberately substituted Wal-Mart for Amazon to make her universe slightly less parallel to ours?).
I tried to distance myself a bit from current events and appreciate it as well-written novel. Mostly unsuccessfully, but I still marvel at how deep and mature this book is. The characters are so real--Luce Cannon maybe moreso than Rosemary, but still both are great. Even the minor characters are real characters. Her generous view of human nature really comes through.
This book should go down as a marker of its time--if you want to understand how things are at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, read this. I hope this is the first of many Sarah Pinsker novels, we could see the field revive.
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