Ric's Reviews > Walkaway

Okay friends, if you like negative reviews then strap in because there aren’t many positive things I can say about this book. Walkaway was my first Doctorow book, and I don’t like to judge authors on just one book, but this wasn’t a good start for me. I like to start off reviews for books that I didn’t like with a positive from the book, but I really can’t think of one so here come the problems. But just as a warmup, an actual phrase from this novel to describe a character is “cute as a cute thing”.

First of all, I had so many problems with the characters. Everyone in this book had a really stupid name and it was terribly distracting. Iceweasel, Limpopo, Kersplebedeb (which I can’t even pronounce), and that doesn’t even count one character who’s known as Etcetera because he has 20 first names. Seriously. All of the characters motivations were very unclear, none of them had any actual reason to “walk away”, or if they did than it wasn’t known in the novel at all.

There was also a weirdly high amount of sexual stuff in this novel too. At the beginning, they talk about the communal baths that were at their first home base and mentioned repeatedly how they weren’t sexual in nature at all, but they led to pretty much every main character’s relationship and way too graphic sex scenes (seriously, the first one was like three pages long and it was uncomfortable, and it didn’t get any better or shorter from there).

I’ve never read a novel that was so liberal with its use of time jumps at all, especially since they didn’t tell the readers how long of a jump it was or that there even was one to begin with. Characters were captured and then all of a sudden they were back without any real explanation of how they got back or reunion with the other characters. Or the group will be forced out of their home and have a new one that’s twice as big that they built from scratch by the next chapter. One chapter, the characters are young, and the next they’ll randomly have grey hair and kids. They introduced new characters with no exposition on them because they were part of the group for years, but not the years we saw. It was annoying and confusing.

And lastly, the whole “walk away” thing was flat out stupid an unnecessary. Realistically, it was just a backdrop for the war between the walkaways and society over their attempts to build technology to upload their consciousness to some sort of mainframe in order to cheat death. Those consciousnesses that were updated early turned out to be the worst deus ex machina, so much so that it was actually referenced in the book at one point that they basically solved everything because plot.

All in all, I feel like I wasted my time reading this, which really sucks. Obviously you never want to dislike a book, and I really don’t like giving books one star, but I really did not enjoy this one at all.