Book #39 of 2021:
The Effort by Claire Holroyde
There are occasional glimmers of potential to this new sci-fi release that tempt me to award a 2-star rating — ‘it was ok,’ on the Goodreads scale — but the bad parts are honestly pretty bad and even the best sections aren’t great. The sex writing alone, which is thankfully brief, deserves to be singled out for inflicting the phrase “she loved the threat of his genitals glancing her buttocks” upon unsuspecting readers. There’s also a heap of casual racism, sexism, and ableism in the text, hardly any of which is critiqued or even acknowledged.
As for the story, it concerns the wholly derivative notion of a giant comet with a high likelihood of striking the earth, and the last-ditch effort of a diverse team of scientists to… do something about it. They’re launching some sort of payload at the object to avert catastrophe, but debut author Claire Holroyde never really spells out exactly what or how. When the group first assembles to work on a solution I was expecting this book to read like Andy Weir’s The Martian, but it largely avoids the level of detail that makes that title feel so grounded. If anything the writer Holroyde most resembles is Dan Brown: not in the ludicrous plotting at least, but in the insistence on having one expert character explain to another such basic concepts as FEMA, the ISS, and the expression ‘deus ex machina.’
The news of impending doom causes society to break apart in graphically violent rioting, but again it feels as though we’re missing a few key scenes actually explaining the logic here. Absent the immediacy of a plague like Station Eleven or climate event like Life As We Knew It, there’s little to justify such a drastic planetwide overhaul of civilization. (Even the nihilism of The Last Policeman in the face of a similar approaching meteor is given far more shading and definition than the version in this setting.) The narrative’s tendency to flit among various viewpoints around the world doesn’t help either, as too many of them both don’t meaningfully intersect and are not particularly engaging on their own terms.
I’m ultimately just plain flummoxed by what this novel is attempting to do, and I have serious questions for the editors who allowed it to come to print and audiobook in its present form.
[Content warning for rape.]
★☆☆☆☆
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