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A companion novel to 1984, this attempts to flesh out the Julia of the original. It throws you into the world, so if you haven’t read 1984 (and if you haven’t I don’t know why you’d pick this up) you’ll be lost.

This isn’t the pithy prose of Orwell, and yet there was still a lot telling instead of showing as we see Julia navigate this authoritarian landscape.

This is billed as a feminist retelling but Julia is just exploited over and over while she cares about absolutely nothing, and even when she has growth we see in the end that it doesn’t even matter.

I struggled to understand Julia’s motivations. She’s apathetic for nearly the entire book and I could never tell if that’s a comment on this oppressive regime or just poor character development. Even when she hates Big Brother it was hard to see how she got there, and her final deliverance isn’t really a deliverance at all so I’m not sure what the point is. You can just read 1984.

This also needs trigger warnings for CSA.

I received an arc from NetGalley