Review: All These Things I've Done

All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was an enjoyable book, but I hesitate to say much more than that about it. While it was a fun read, I found it a little too uneven for my taste. The writing style is relatively easy to read, which would indicate a younger audience, but the content (mafioso style executions, lust) was perhaps a bit much for that audience. Further, I wasn't certain I could buy into the concept of the story.

Anya lives in a future New York--about 60 years into the future. Her grandmother would have been one of today's teens. She, her older brother, her little sister, and her dying grandmother live together in an old penthouse. Anya's father was a leader of a crime family that dealt in illegal chocolate, and he was murdered by unknown persons. Her mother was also killed in a hit--a hit which damaged Anya's older brother, Leo, leaving him mentally unable to achieve adulthood. The city is unstable, and so is Anya's family. While she wants nothing to do with the business, she gradually finds herself caught by the mere connection of sharing a name.

The New York City of this novel is driven by scarcity. Water has been drying up, to the point where many lakes are dry, and it is expensive. Paper is taxed, although there seems to be enough to print all sorts of vouchers needed to buy luxury items like ice cream. Alcohol consumption is legal for all ages, but chocolate is banned. Dealing in chocolate is a serious crime. Speakeasies serve coffee at all hours.

The problem of this book lies in its concept. For a futuristic society like this to work well, there needs to be a reason for the unreasonable. The ban on chocolate is both bizarre and unexplained. Anya explains that chocolate is addictive, but that's not a good reason to ban it. The idea that the government would suddenly ban chocolate, and that otherwise ordinary confectioners would become gangsters as a result, simply doesn't work well. Zevin's picture of high school classrooms doesn't function well, either. While I would agree that it's a mistake to measure the high school of this book against ours today, I had a very difficult time suspending my disbelief in order to accept that it was common for a school to offer three years of Forensic Science classes.

While I did like the book, and I might look into borrowing the sequel, I did not like this book well enough to wholeheartedly recommend it to others.



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