Tuesday, August 29, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North


At a certain point in The Sudden Appearance of Hope, I was fully riveting in the story and could not help keep reading (despite it being past 1 in the morning).  The story had a strong central character, a strong set of ideas, and was far from predictable.  And....well, like many books, it didn't really pull through all of its threads into a satisfactory ending.  In a way, the book tries to pull off a bit more than it can chew, and loses itself in the process.

More after the Jump:



---------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------
When Hope Arden turned 16, she noticed something strange happen to her:  Everyone who lost sight of her for even a short period of time would seem to forget everything about her - her face, her words, and who she was.  She could be seen on digital media, but even someone who had seen her on such wouldn't recognize her when they saw her.  This posed a tremendous problem - not even her parents or her friends could remember who she was, making relationships sort of impossible.  The result was an extreme loneliness, and Hope turned to international theivery due to her curse.

But when a person she became close with commits suicide due to not living up to the standards of a new major App: Perfection - Hope becomes driven to take the corporation behind the App down. The App drives people to live more "perfect" lives, with those who achieve certain levels of perfection being entitled to certain brain treatments to potentially make them happier.  After stealing from a party run by the corporation, Hope finds herself involved in a conflict between the Corporation and a rogue individual who also seeks to bring the corporation down....even by EXTREME measures.  But when the treatments of the corporation show signs of being able to cure Hope's "forgetfulness" problem, Hope's own mission and end goals will become extremely unclear.
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The Sudden Appearance of Hope essentially deals with three major ideas:
The first, is the impact of being unable to be remembered by anyone on one's life, and the extreme loneliness that might entail.
The second is the question of perfection and whether it means anything to strive for another's idea of perfection, even to the point of having one's brain altered to change one's personality to be "happier."
The third is how far should one go to try to stop a corrupt/evil concept from taking root in the world.

The story starts off heavily dealing with the first two questions, and then sort of dovetails heavily into the third - with Hope also dealing with a character (involved in the 3rd) who seems to think of her curse as a blessing instead.  But well, it's always pretty clear in the story that that character is going too far and that Hope's ability is not a good thing, so while the ending could be seen to some extent as a tragedy - Not to spoil anything, but it should be apparently early on in this one that this book is not going to end happily - a large amount of the events to end this one are predictable and unsatisfying.

Again, it's a shame, because the setup in this book is tremendous, and Hope is a terrific character, and her loneliness, as well as the loneliness of one other major character, is incredibly moving and heartbreaking to read about.  But the third idea kind of sidetracks this book, and it's never really a question that's genuinely explored (unlike in some other books). Again, this is a fascinating books at times, which is why I gave it a 7.5 out of 10 - hardly a bad rating.  It just fails to live up to a great promise it shows early on.



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