CoffeeAndThorn reviewed Psychic's Memoirs by Ryan Hyatt
Review of "Psychic's Memoirs" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is a book that doesn’t let you pin it down. Part detective thriller, part dystopian post apocalypse, part paranormal fantasy… but all of it solidly and surprisingly grounded in an uncomfortable political commentary – not quite a political satire, but definitely a wide awake, eyes-open observation of contemporary America.
It’s set in 2026 – a year not so very far away. Not as far away, say, as 1984 was to 1948, when Orwell put pen to paper. Of course, the world changes faster now, so the author has crammed in a lot more technological change than Orwell dared to –a lot of it being AI gadgets and personal knick-knacks, and it would hardly be plausible to think ten years ahead and not have more of those. The bobble-head robot is particularly delicious. But as with 1984, this is really a book about the present. A book that has things …
This is a book that doesn’t let you pin it down. Part detective thriller, part dystopian post apocalypse, part paranormal fantasy… but all of it solidly and surprisingly grounded in an uncomfortable political commentary – not quite a political satire, but definitely a wide awake, eyes-open observation of contemporary America.
It’s set in 2026 – a year not so very far away. Not as far away, say, as 1984 was to 1948, when Orwell put pen to paper. Of course, the world changes faster now, so the author has crammed in a lot more technological change than Orwell dared to –a lot of it being AI gadgets and personal knick-knacks, and it would hardly be plausible to think ten years ahead and not have more of those. The bobble-head robot is particularly delicious. But as with 1984, this is really a book about the present. A book that has things to say about unchained capitalism, about police brutality, about climate change and pollution and uban decay. About inquality and political oppression and being a kid in an impossibly damaged world . Reading this book on the day Trump finally lost the US election, the California of this book is pretty close to the nightmarish America that exists in my European imagination. I didn’t find the world implausible.
There’s the magic stuff and the superpowers of course – I never was one for the paranormal, though it didn’t annoy me in this story as it has done in some. This was paranormal in rather the Mulder and Scully tradition– something to be skeptical about and investigate – extra-terrestrial perhaps, or evolutionary... But the “school for kids with superpowers” (bit of a trope now isn’t it?) didn’t do it for me. I’d have preferred the book with just one magical mystery, the girl who can see the future. In a book about a dystopian present, isn’t this the superpower that everyone most wants and most dreads? The rest are just party tricks.
The characters redeemed the magic stuff for me – all were nicely drawn, believable and their stories left me minding about them. They go through some grim things, and I felt it. By the end of the book I had lost myself in the story, giving up – finally – my analytic zeal. It’s a good story.