Book Review: «Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia» by Jason Pargin

robertmcgrath

Jan 14

Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia by Jason Pargin

I read an earlier story about Zoey Ashe (the connection is confused by the author's use of different bylines), which I didn't like all that much. But, I won't lie, I couldn't pass up a book with this title!

The story is set in Zoey's complicated life, inherited from her unknown to her father, a major oligarch in a freewheeling future Vegas. With great power comes…a great many problems?

Municipal elections are looming, though they are just part of a continuous jockeying for power among the wealthy, powerful, and wanna bes. As the most famous woman in Tabula Ra$a, Zoey is a target and foil for so many schemes and conspiracies, it's insane. But at heart she's still just Zoey, barista from a trailer park, just trying to be decent to people and party as much as possible.

Naturally, Zoey gets dragged into the election shenanigans (perhaps she should pay attention more in the meetings), which seem to involve multiple conflicting psyops. Some of them are lethal, and all of them unpleasant. The unpleasantness involves, among other things, multiple, overlapping, disinformation campaigns. Everybody does it, and everybody is done to. It's pretty awful.

Adding to the dystopia, Zoey is very taken with a performance artist, who she meets when he pranks her rather spectacularly. The guy is a pain in the ass, and completely untrustworthy, and way more trouble than he's worth. Is there any doubt that Zoey's going to fall hard for this shmuck? Sigh.

Stuff happens. Crazy stuff happens. Violent stuff happens. People get hurt. The fate of the very crazy city may hang in the balance.

Just another week in Zoey's world.

As I commented about the first book, the writing is a bit uneven. There are a lot of good parts; Zoey and her friends, the crazy city of Tabula Ra$a, and a complete loony plot (actually multiple loony plots). But there is far more philosophical rumination than I really need, most of it pretty juvenile. These long asides don't do much to move the story, and aren't especially educational, if that's the purpose. The book would be 100 pages shorter and, IMO, probably much better without all that undergraduate level political economics.

I gather that there is another Zoey book I didn't read, with a title that I'm not going to repeat. I read Dystopia because of a great title, and I didn't read the other one because of a bad title. Perhaps there is a lesson here, Pargin, or whatever your name really is.