Ana Simo (1)

I was inclined to love Heartland if only because it’s 75-year-old Simo’s debut novel, but then it made me love it all the more when it performed the amazing feat of surprising me on every page — for its truthfulness, and for its humor. It's a book that mixes shock and humor, but it's not shock humor. The writing is lovely. I felt as if I was being told a story by a wonderful human being and I suspect I was.

I can't help but compare this to another recent political shock satire, [b:The Sellout|22237161|The Sellout|Paul Beatty|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403430899s/22237161.jpg|41610676], (a very high bar) and it just doesn't hold up. In Beatty's book, the shocks are tightly woven into the narrative (really, they ARE the narrative) and serve a very clear purpose, but here they seem to be there just for shock's sake itself. Although the book intends to be a political critique of (I think) show more western patriarchal values (which can use all the critiquing it can get) the plot is so loose and the purpose so vague that the message is lost. Since the characters in satires aren't meant to be 'real' and are more like commedia del arte figures, the plot, structure and message have to do all the heavy lifting themselves, and they were just too weak for me here. On a sentence and scene level I liked the book, but it just didn't hang together. It feels like the first draft of what could be a good book. show less

I have to quit on this one. The verbose text combined with the ethnic slurs and constant harangue about another character’s weight is not making for a good reading experience for me.