Already, I might be dropping another book. Recently, I mentioned lamentably having to drop Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth collection because the third story was boring me to tears, and I wasn’t expecting to hit another snag so soon.
Sarah Curtis and Sarah Mitzenberg had been best friends since fifth grade. They had a secret sign language and were totally insufferable. Sarah Hunt was too proud of all the antidepressants she was taking. Sarah Jones picked her nose in public, then examined whatever she’d excavated on her fingertips for a long time. Up close. She has Asperger’s or something like that, it was reported, which made her easier to forgive, but the sight of her, even when not engaged in her oblivious grotesqueries, made Sarah Moss cringe.
Now, this character is a sophomore in high school, and the entire section from which this is taken surely establishes that she is petty and judgmental. Still, I’m a bit taken aback by describing an allegedly-autistic character’s “oblivious grotesqueries”.
I’m not bowing out just yet. This is very early in the book, only the second chapter. But I guess I’m serving public notice here on Last Day by Domenica Ruta.
That said, I did enjoy A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark, which is what I read after dropping the Liu Cixin and starting the Domenica Ruta.