Three young adults grapple with the usual thirty-something problems--boredom, authenticity, an omnipotent online oligarchy--in David Shafer's darkly comic debut novel.The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this secret battle stumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, a disillusioned non-profit worker; Leo Crane, an unhinged trustafarian; and Mark Deveraux, a phony self-betterment guru who works for the Committee.Leo and Mark were best friends in college, but early adulthood has set them on diverging paths. Growing increasingly disdainful of Mark's platitudes, Leo publishes a withering takedown of his ideas online. But the Committee is reading--and erasing--Leo's words. On the other side of the world, Leila's discoveries about the Committee's far-reaching ambitions threaten to ruin those who are closest to her. In the spirit of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk,Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is both a suspenseful global thriller and an emotionally truthful novel about the struggle to change the world in- and outside your head.

My Review:

I LOVED this book. Well until I got to the end and it just ended with no real resolution. I thought maybe it is a series! I checked GoodReads and no it was an ending in the same way as David Foster Wallace. I am not smart enough to make heads or tails of authors such as David Foster Wallace. I had an English Professor attempt to explain postmodernism in college and I told the dude straight up. This stuff is bullshit, why would you write a story and not finish it? Can I write my final halfway and still get an A? Ok I UNDERSTAND it I guess, I just don’t like it. BUT I did like this book even though it ends right in a climatic scene. I mean seriously it ends so suddenly that I thought NetGalley had fucked up THEN I checked Goodreads. OK then.

That was the only thing that I did not like. It starts out as three different stories and you wonder how it will all tie in together. Now that I think of it there were a couple of stories that had no resolution but again the plot that does happen makes up for it.

It is a mash-up of several genres. I thought it was brilliantly done. It does require at some points to ignore some  laws of time and space but nothing like enlarging your brain, right? In another way it was spooky. I mean what if it REALLY happened? What if some dude was out there saving all your data then tried to sell it back to you? It looks like the author did know either as that’s where the story ends. Ok can you tell that this ending is bugging me?

I will still give it 5 stars for plot and dialogue and creativity. And guts. Extra points for guts. I mean it had to take guts not to finish the story and still publish it. Postmodernism be damned.

Am I the only one who hates books with no real ending?