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A review by horrorbutch
27 Hours by Tristina Wright
3.0
Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I want to start my review by linking to Aimal's, who talks about the racial representation in this book. While diversity in books is important, it's just really weird that the most specicist characters in this book where the non-white ones.
Now this book is probably one of the most diverse books I've ever read. 3 out of 5 main characters are non-white, not a single one of them is cishet, there's a hearing impaired main character, that lives with her deaf grandmother and uses sign language to communicate with her and her friends.
While I really liked the LGBT+ rep that we got in this book and that each of these identities are important to the characters, the racial rep was mostly just there without ever playing a role. The story is set in the future and apparently in a post-race world. We don't discriminate based on skin color anymore. We just hate monsters now. While of course neither someone's race nor someone's sexuality nor anything else should ever be the be-all of a character, portraying a diverse cast, but having the racial aspects of said cast disappear in the background because "race no longer matters, there's only one culture now, the human culture (aka western, mostly america-centric)" is not the best of racial representation. Barely any of the characters have ties to their culture, this all just disappeared. Now, of course, that is a common sci-fi trope, but I just really expected better from a book that was hyped as a super diverse sci-fi story. Colorblindness is not the same as actual acceptance. (especially with the colonization-allegory tied into all of this and the absolutely terrible part where the Nigerian/Indian character is the one that hates the chimera the most and then has to be educated by the white characters that maybe colonization is bad, you know?)
Another thing that bothered me about this story is that fact that we just have 72 hours for all the plot. While this is an interesting concept it just messes up the pacing a lot. We have to get to know way too many characters for this limited amount of time. Hell, one couple falls in love and tries to have sex all in the middle of fighting a war. In 72 hours. Yeah... not really the most believable of love stories.
Other than that, this was certainly an enjoyable fast-paced read and I definitely adored all the representation we got, but especially the racial rep could have been done better.
I want to start my review by linking to Aimal's, who talks about the racial representation in this book. While diversity in books is important, it's just really weird that the most specicist characters in this book where the non-white ones.
Now this book is probably one of the most diverse books I've ever read. 3 out of 5 main characters are non-white, not a single one of them is cishet, there's a hearing impaired main character, that lives with her deaf grandmother and uses sign language to communicate with her and her friends.
While I really liked the LGBT+ rep that we got in this book and that each of these identities are important to the characters, the racial rep was mostly just there without ever playing a role. The story is set in the future and apparently in a post-race world. We don't discriminate based on skin color anymore. We just hate monsters now. While of course neither someone's race nor someone's sexuality nor anything else should ever be the be-all of a character, portraying a diverse cast, but having the racial aspects of said cast disappear in the background because "race no longer matters, there's only one culture now, the human culture (aka western, mostly america-centric)" is not the best of racial representation. Barely any of the characters have ties to their culture, this all just disappeared. Now, of course, that is a common sci-fi trope, but I just really expected better from a book that was hyped as a super diverse sci-fi story. Colorblindness is not the same as actual acceptance. (especially with the colonization-allegory tied into all of this and the absolutely terrible part where the Nigerian/Indian character is the one that hates the chimera the most and then has to be educated by the white characters that maybe colonization is bad, you know?)
Another thing that bothered me about this story is that fact that we just have 72 hours for all the plot. While this is an interesting concept it just messes up the pacing a lot. We have to get to know way too many characters for this limited amount of time. Hell, one couple falls in love and tries to have sex all in the middle of fighting a war. In 72 hours. Yeah... not really the most believable of love stories.
Other than that, this was certainly an enjoyable fast-paced read and I definitely adored all the representation we got, but especially the racial rep could have been done better.