I struggle with calling The Windup Girl a good book. And I’m surprised at the acclaim showered on it. The prose is bland and often repetitive. Most of the large cast of characters are completely uninteresting: Emiko, Jaidee/Kanya, and Hock Seng being the only characters that carry any emotional weight. And the plot, while it does finally come to an interesting head, is meandering and tedious. The author presents complications, and not only fails to resolve them, but tosses them aside as though they are irrelevant to the long term plot structure. It’s a bait and switch to artificially heighten the tension. Though the book improves as it progresses and there are scenes, especially toward the end, that are really well done.
But what undermines the book even more is the poorly developed setting. This is a world where you can genehack humans into super powered “new people”,but tomatoes and lemons are extinct? Their seeds have got to be everywhere. Genehack them back from the dead. Considering the technology on display it seems like a much simpler feet then what is routinely accomplished. It feels like the author didn’t take the time to fully develop the repercussions of the technology he is describing.
I think this problem derives from the fact that the author is very much an activist. To him, his message is so important, he will sacrifice his story. The world needs to justify the author’s predefined conclusions, not make sense on its own. Frankly I would expect the events implied by the book’s epilogue to be the real face this world.
And this is unfortunate, because his ideas are really compelling. The “message” is a good one. But over all the quality is definitely that of a first time author.
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