Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
Published: December 1, 2014 by Aqueduct Press
Buy this book at: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo
Synopsis:
A computer program etched into the atmosphere has a story to tell, the story of two people, of a city lost to chaos, of survival and love. The program’s data, however, has been corrupted. As the novel’s characters struggle to survive apocalypse, they are sustained and challenged by the demands of love in a shattered world both haunted and dangerous.
Rating: 
Review:
The best word I can use to describe this book is ambitious. The idea is a really big idea that would be difficult for even the most experienced writer to handle. This came to my attention as an audiobook offering from my library, the blurb intrigued me and so I listened. And honestly, the entire book made me feel like I’d taken a large amount of hallucinogenic drugs.
Essentially, this book is about a computer program that lost its mate. It’s attempting to reconstruct the story of how that happened. And we follow the program through a series of glitches that bring us the same two characters (ostensibly the portrayals of the two computer programs) and put them in varying scenarios before the program glitches again and those characters are recreated as something else. And when I say they become different characters, I really mean that. They switch genders, ages, races, sexualities, motivations, and circumstances. We go from being heterosexual lovers, to gay lovers, to siblings, to parent and child, to a long time couple that has become more of a caretaking situation than a romance, etc. While I found it interesting at first, ultimately it just got very confusing. I could only track the two main characters thanks to the fact that they had similar enough names to track them through these varying tales. Consequently, I found that I didn’t really care about the two characters that much. They were going to be completely different people in just a few pages, and then I’d barely get a chance to know them before they changed again.
I was hoping that we’d slowly get some sort of overarching story that would bind these narratives together. And it started to form by the time I got to the middle, but I tuned out after that. I was lost and my brain was tired of trying to figure out who everyone was all the time. Other reviews tell me that we get a conclusion but I didn’t pay attention to it. The writing is very good but the story was just too messy for me to care about.
Written Among The Stars 
Brave of you to tackle something like this as an audiobook – where backing up to answer ‘What!?!’ is hard to do.
The style – keep something going through many incomprehensible switches – always leaves me cold; I’m not the proper audience for it. My rule when writing is “Don’t confuse the reader,” specifically because we have a long way to go and I want them so fully invested in at least one of the characters that they’re channeling everything in their minds into making that character feel real.
So congratulations on being ambitious yourself, and taking the hit for us, but no thanks.
Thank you! It was quite a challenge as an audiobook. The narrator did a good job trying to help keep it straight, but I had to re-listen to chapters quite a few times. I understand what they were trying to do, but it just didn’t work. Oh well, I like speculative fiction so maybe next time!
I hate speculative fiction in general, and any fiction which confuses the reader, whether by incompetence or deliberate design.
I work so hard not to have these faults in my own fiction that it drives me crazy – or rather, to stop instantly – when what I’m reading has the same problems.
I have trouble parsing stuff as it is; not very flexible of me, I know. So if it’s deliberate, and somehow meant to be ‘good for you’, I’m just not the intended audience for the writer’s ‘brilliance’ – and they won’t miss me.