Reviews and Comments

it's weird reading a book about a half filipino growing up in florida, when I was a half filipino growing up in florida. It is a deeply confusing experience to know your family came from a place, and to have no knowledge of that place, and Annabelle articulated that so beautifully.

A bit liberal and reformist in its approach to the topic. However, this book offers an excellent overview of current surveillance practices, as well as evidence for why those surveillance practices don't accomplish their stated objectives.

With that said, this book doesn't offer an analysis on why surveillance and other counterinsurgency measures occur in this country. I would not recommend this book if you are looking for that deeper analysis.

It was fucking beautiful

I wanted to like this book more. And the beginning and the ending were compelling and easy to get through. I really liked the ideas about decentralized systems that was part of the world building, and how technology and nature can exist in symbiosis.

That said, perhaps I wasn't a fan of the writing style? There was a family drama in the center of the story, but I did not find those conflicts to add a lot of meaningful tension to the overall story.

My number one critique of this book is that it had so many opportunities to share and relate revolutionary movements throughout history to the climate movement, and it did not. Even worse, there were parts of the book that critiqued attacks on oil pipelines in the SWANA region that were connected to local anti-imperialist movements, without drawing the connection between anti imperialism and the climate movement (embarrassing, frankly).

That said, I think the book is a fine introduction to the idea that violence in the form of property destruction is a legitimate action to take, although I wish the book made a stronger case to the idea of armed resistance in the pursuit of national democracy and socialism. I also think the last chapter of the book was the strongest, since it offered good critiques of climate doomerism.

Anyway, I shouldn't be surprised lol, but whatever, it was fine.

my loan from the library expired - it was really interesting, I might pick up again

This book made me feel disgusted in a way that a book has never made me feel. It was really fascinating, and upsetting, and I'm glad it's over. I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre, so perhaps it wasn't for me. But, as brutal as this book was, and how clearly allegorical it was, it surprisingly did not have a lot to say beyond "imagine what it would be like if we had industrialized meat but made from humans". Maybe it did say something more than that (it did seem to touch on the topic of how we so easily can dehumanize others), but I didn't grasp it. ANYWAY, it was okay, thanks TikTok for the recommendation.

The first part of this book was utterly confusing, with how it shifted perspectives and time periods with each chapter. This book made me feel a lot of things - I felt recognition in all of those peculiarities of being Filipino, the heaviness of that experience, but also the joyful resilience. It's odd reading a book that spoke so frankly of the US genocide against the Filipino people, when that's something I never learned in school as an American, or even from my mother who is from the Philippines. I feel angry and sorrowful - when will we see justice? When will we have our own self determination? The book doesn't answer these questions beyond the simple fact that we must struggle for it ourselves, and expect it from no one, especially anyone posing as our "benevolent" saviors.