Thursday, January 4, 2018

Decelerate Blue by Adam Rapp

Title: Decelerate Blue
Author: Adam Rapp
Illustrator: Mike Cavallaro
Length: 199 pages
Published: February 2017

In this dystopian world, life has become so accelerated that the focus of everything is on speed and efficiency. In speech, contractions are mandatory, adverbs are discouraged, and when you finish speaking you say "Go." Cool things are called "hyper" and movies are 14 minutes long. Angela discovers a resistance movement underground, where people are trying to slow down by never using contractions, sitting and reading, and lowering their heart rates. There's a bit of a young love story in there too.

I think this is a great concept for a dystopia, but while I enjoyed this graphic novel I feel like a novel might have done a better job of exploring the world a bit more. Lots of aspects of the world are hinted at but never explained, like how everyone talks about "guaranteeing their Guarantees" and people say "Go, Guarantee, Go!" to each other. What is the Guarantee Committee? What is the Database? These questions are never answered. The dystopian feel was good, but in my opinion a good dystopia has details.

The same is true of character development. I wanted to get to know the characters more (except the surprisingly many unpleasant characters in the underground; what's up with that?). Also, the plot goes at a good pace but then suddenly all the big stuff happens and the book is over!

So ultimately, I enjoyed this book, but I wanted MORE of everything.

Oh, also, the underground deciding to all take drugs together at the same time without really getting a chance to even see the effects of it made them seem a little less like a resistance and a little more like a cult. So that was a strange direction for them to take.

3 stars.

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