Dystopian Fiction

Best of All Worlds Review

Book: Best of All Worlds
Author: Kenneth Oppel
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Xavier Oak doesn’t particularly want to go to the family cottage with his dad and pregnant stepmother. But family obligations are family obligations, so he leaves his mom, his brother, and the rest of his life behind for a weekend at the lake. Except…on the first morning, he wakes up and the cottage isn’t where it was before. It’s like it’s been lifted and placed somewhere else.
When Xavier, his dad, and Mia go explore, they find they are inside a dome, trapped. And there’s no one else around.
Until, three years later, another family arrives.
The Jacksons are a welcome addition at first – especially Mackenzie, a girl Xavier’s exact age. But Mackenzie’s father has very different views on who their captors are, and his actions lead to tension, strife, and sacrifice.
In this masterpiece, award-winning author Kenneth Oppel has created a heart-stopping, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it-story, showing how our very human choices collectively lead to humanity’s eventual fate.”

Review : Best of All Worlds is a serious mind bending, quasi-scifi, semi-dystopian work of speculative fiction. A family leaves for their lake cabin, something they’ve done for over and over again for so many weekends of their lives, and when they wake in the morning they find they’re somewhere else entirely. What follows is a journey into what a so-called perfect life might look like : no diseases, no bugs, no predators; what a simpler life in a world undisturbed by human activity might entail: hard work, homesteading, eating simply; and what kind of emotional processing that might require. We spend perhaps just shy of one third of the book with the Oaks alone during the first few weeks after they arrive, learning the lay of the habitat, discovering they’re encased within some kind of smart, self-healing dome under which they have electricity and everything they need to survive, but not much else. We find they’re all on their own, their captors seem fairly benevolent, and while they certainly haven’t been transported and isolated with consent, they do their best to make do with the situation at hand. It’s at this point that the book jumps three years into the future – our protagonist Xavier is now 16 years old and has given up all hope of ever seeing another soul again when, out exploring the dome in the middle of the night, looking for a way out, he witnesses a new home being built by tiny nano-bots. The Jackson’s have arrived and suddenly the Oaks are no longer alone.

Oppel has created a visionary work that left me with questions all the way up until the final page. There was no moment where I’d figured everything out, nothing that disappointed me in a predictable sort of way. Best of All Worlds is a truly impressive work that delves into the current climate disaster, the weight of impending future pandemics, climate related deaths, and the paranoia and racism that seem to grip so many people these days. Set sometime in the future, though I would suspect it might be sometime between 10 and 15 years beyond where we find ourselves now, BoAW takes place at a time when the climate crisis has turned into a full-blown climate emergency, with sea walls being built (or not built, depending on the not really mentioned political leanings of each particular state), thousands of people dying due to heat domes over intensely warm states like Florida, climate refugees seeking new land, and, of course, horrific racist conspiracy theories that keep people in the grimy clutches of paranoia. The Jackson’s offer a foil to the Oak’s level-headed mindset – Riley Jackson, our intrepid patriarch, is a deeply paranoid Christian with a belief that the broader governmental system is out to get, well, everyone. Convinced that the dome is nothing more than a big government conspiracy designed to…do something vague…Riley sets out immediately to find a way out and through, to expose the government’s plans, and to live on the fringes of society while he does so. On the other hand, we have Caleb Oak, hard working the land where he now lives, convinced that the reason they’re living within the dome is due to some form of alien activity – a conclusion he only came to after several years living as a captive, seeing technology he’s never witnessed before, and gaining an understanding of what does and doesn’t work in this place. Two equally strange ideal systems, though Caleb Oak seems content to exist in a world where his family is safe and freedom is less about fear and more about a calculated, level-headed decision.

Oppel speaks so clearly to the fear-based conspiracy theories that currently run amok within our world, particularly within the United States, and while we all know this isn’t exclusive to the US by a long shot, we do see this played out in the book with the Oaks being Canadian and the Jackson’s hailing from Tennessee. Much like Xavier will find at the end of the book, I believe anyone on any spectrum of political ideology could read BoAW and come away with something different – we hear what we want to hear, read what we want to read. However, there’s no overlooking the very real inherent through-line of racism that permeates everything the Jackson’s do, the way in which their own need for a life free of fear has actually cast their entire world in a metaphorical bubble of fear and hatred and, ultimately, evil, and the way in which the incessant need to overcome what they perceive as a targeted attack on their rights ultimately leads to just one thing : death. In our present world, this may look like so many things, from the genuine climate disaster, to concentration camps, deportations without due process, and the vulnerability of the weakest members of society when anti-vax conspiracies and rugged individualism run rampant. There’s a lot to be said for compassion, and I believe that’s what Oppel is touching on with this book – a desperate need for compassion, for truth to prevail, and for humanity to release it’s grasp on the idea that we are somehow alone amongst the masses of those who might not be or think just how we do.

This is one of those rare books where I’m going to choose not to spoil anything for you, even with a spoiler warning. You won’t know what hit you until you turn that final page, so buckle up and dive in, you don’t want to miss this one.

Advice : Part science fiction, part coming-of-age, Best of All Worlds is an excellent read. Perfect for those interested in the nuance of the ever widening divide between political parties, for those who believe the humanity deep within each of us is something that makes us inherently more connected than we ever will be different, and for those who are really ready to see the racist get what’s coming to them in the end. That’s all I’ll say for now. Read this one.

The Distractions Review

Book: The Distractions
Author: Liza Monroy
Publisher: Regalo Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Mischa Osborn spends her days as a ProWatcher – keeping distracted people on task and lonely ones accompanies – from her Brooklyn Mega-building, while eating Petri-Meat Steax and working out with her favorite personal trainer, a straight-talking algorithm named Tory.
Her carefully constructed, isolated existence is suddenly upended by a chance realspace encounter with a HighlightReel celebrity, Nicolas Adan Luchano. On their first date, hiking in Kuulsuits and watching DroneBeez pollinate flowers, Mischa experiences a brief but intense realspace connection.
Mischa takes to relentlessly watching Nic onReel. As Mischa’s ReelWatching spirals into an all-consuming obsession, and even realspace stalking, Mischa takes increasingly desperate measures to be seen and valued, sucking others into her vortex of obsession until she completely loses control.
Meanwhile, someone is equally obsessed with Mischa, tracking her every move and perhaps even influencing her choices.
A tale of how technology enables obsession, envy, and unrelenting comparison, told through an eccentric cast of interconnected characters, The Distractions invites us to reflect on who we are watching, and why.”

Review : Liza Monroy’s The Distractions asks what might happen if our lives became nothing more than content for others to watch, taking our current reality several steps beyond where we find ourselves in 2025. Set in some kind of ambiguous future – is it one hundred years, two hundred, a thousand? – The Distractions is an imagining of where our lives might take us if things were simply not to deviate from where they are in the present. In a world where we are constantly attached to our phones, where smart homes, smart watches, smart glasses, and self-driving cars are becoming more and more the norm, it’s not hard to see where Monroy’s concept was born. Mischa, our protagonist, spends years consumed with obsession, literally (no, really) losing herself to the endless succession of constantly streamed video feeds of the objects of her ever-worsening obsession. I think it’s worth noting that The Distractions reads like an addiction spiral and if you’ve found yourself in that space, this may not be the right book for you.

I’ll be the first to admit that dystopian fiction is not my favorite, to put it lightly. I wasn’t completely clear on just how dystopian this book would be until I really got into the meat of it – I knew it would be futuristic as it begins with five pages filled with verbiage necessary to understanding the world Monroy has crafted. Five. It’s a task for any author to fully create a functioning and understandable world, and while this is something I encounter more regularly in the realm of fantasy, Monroy gave herself quite the task with this book. I do think she succeeded in creating a reality that I was able to easily understand after I spent the first chapter flipping back and forth between her compendium of terms and the page I was reading. Once I got into the novel, I was able to seamlessly grasp the terms and concepts as they’re just not that far off from where we are these days and the terms we have in our common vocabulary. I will say, I found this to be less speculative and more progressive, if that makes sense! There was so little imagining of the future and truly so much speeding up from where we are – the understanding is that as a society we only evolve through technology and rampant consumerism and all the rest we just learn to live with. Like most dystopian novels, it was flat out sad.

The Distractions amplifies a world we already find ourselves living within and with an uptick in people considering leaving social media or seeking out other sources of connection, I think Monroy did herself a disservice by choosing not to be speculative. Speaking of the landscape in California, Monroy tells us that everything is on fire these days – the timing of this book feels potent; of the air quality and heat index, one can only step outside while wearing a protective suit and most choose to stay inside instead; of food, we see Mischa et al consuming lab grown “meat” and cricket powders; of bird populations, well, there aren’t any. It’s all so reminiscent of our current reality that as things do change and progress and we, ideally, evolve beyond our need to consume at all costs, I think The Distractions will, at least in small part, become irrelevant and that’s a tough thing for a dystopian futuristic novel. And I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic here, but maybe I am. I just tend to expect that the current and immediate future generations will find ways to connect with each other outside of online spaces, particularly as our online spaces take a turn for the worse.

Where this book fell flat for me, is in the functional flow of the narration and the content within. While written well and given appropriate pacing, particularly as we witness Mischa losing literal years of her life, it felt as though it wasn’t a fully thought out concept outside the actual obsession that comprised 85% of the book. Monroy initially describes Mischa as preferring to keep to herself, to not engage with other humans, and to appropriately divvy up her time. However, the downward spiral into obsession came on quickly, as though this wasn’t the first time it happened, and the inability to even see glimpses of Mischa’s past life felt off. I realize the nature of addiction looks different to everyone, but it felt incomplete, as if we were missing crucial details about Mischa’s life prior to beginning the book. Likewise, the ending of the book was a convoluted, confusing mess that left me wondering why it was written the way it was. I was left with questions that might have served as intriguing methods of concluding the book but instead grew tangled the more Monroy attempted to explain them. It didn’t feel neat, it felt needlessly messy; I can be completely content with messy if it’s purposeful and intentional and meets the standard of the entirety of the book, but this was not that. Finally, yes, Mischa was being watched the entire time, we know this because there’s a second narrator, but the finale (and the back of the book) make this narrator out to be much more sinister than they came across in our time spent with them – and I found the details of just how this being watched Mischa to be convoluted and confusing at best. There’s so little explanation for the voyeur that it almost felt like I wasn’t meant to question it, but of course I did because there was no explanation…you see my problem?

Ultimately, this was an interesting concept that reminded me at times of the movie Wall-E and at times of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I could go on for many more paragraphs about the implications of AL (advanced algorithms in The Distractions), the ethics presented in this book, of autonomous artificial intelligence, and our perceived humanity within the complex matrix of technology, but I’ll leave it here. The Distractions was interesting and clearly fleshed out in ways I will never be able to grasp, but it felt incomplete and perhaps even unnecessary, or at least I can hope. And maybe that’s all that can really be said about a dystopian novel, at the end of the day. It makes you hope and wish for a better future, and this book certainly did that for me.

Advice : If you, like me, aren’t the biggest fan of dystopian fiction, if you prefer speculative fiction, or you’re horrified by the idea of AI or social media taking over our lives, this may not be for you. If you enjoy the ethics and philosophy behind all of the above, you may just well love this one.