Mystery

A thriller about a social tech company entering the Chinese market and rigging US elections? You have my attention. Welcome to Circles (not to be confused with Egger’s disaster of a novel the Circle): a company with 2 billion users, questionable boardroom politics, and based on this book, no female employees. It’s a breezy read, the premise is great, the plot and characters middling, but I still enjoyed it. The author gets lots of things wrong about a thinly veiled fictional Facebook (I.e. only 2 billion users? Not if I have anything to do with it! And while we’re at it, it’s ’terms of service’, not ’terms of use’), but the surprising part is that the book is engaging in a this-is-obviously-fiction-but-not-offensively-bad sort of way. ...

Fun, but squarely in the uncanny valley between fiction and non fiction. Taken as a collection of short vignettes, it was entertaining. However, the characters felt like soapboxes, the plot only barely hung together, and I didn’t like the protagonist. It felt like a simplified preachy version of order of the phoenix, with encryption rather than magic and the dhs rather than voldermort.