Blog Tour: Afterparty by Daryl Gregory (review)

Afterparty
written by Daryl Gregory
published by Tor Books

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads

Why did I pick this book: I participated in the blog tour hosted by PR by the Book. (I received a copy of this book for review purposes.). 

Did I enjoy this book: It was… interesting.   You know how when someone asks how you’re doing they really just expect you to say, “good” so they can move the conversation forward without actually having to invest?  Yeah.  Well, when the intern asks what you’re reading as you wait for the doctor, you really ought to just say “a dystopian novel,”  and leave it at that.  She’s going to give you a weird look when you start chatting about printers that print drugs and godly hallucinations and imaginary friends, and by the time you get to the bit about the ex-assassin and the cigarette (yes, cigarette) smuggling and the logistics of how two women can grow a child with no sperm, her eyes are going to gloss over and she’s going to start thinking you’re a weirdo.

…and that’s the story of how I met my new gynecologist…

As for the book, I liked it.  It wasn’t always written exactly clearly, and there were several moments when I considered giving up, but for the most part it was a decent, solid, quirky little book that kept me reading to the end.

Would I recommend it: As long as you don’t have issues with foul language or alternative lifestyles you’ll be good to go.

About the book – from Goodreads: It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

A mind-bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Daryl Gregory’s Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter Watts’s Starfish: a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.