Noah Hawley’s book Before The Fall was a favorite of mine back in 2016, so I was pleased to receive a copy of his new book, Anthem, from Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for this honest review. And wow, lots of hype around this one: “The first big novel of 2022” and an “epic thriller…as timeless as a Grimm’s fairy tale.” So I was READY for a great read!

The first sentence is a grabber: “The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history.” Before too many pages, we are immersed in a world spiraling into…what? It is a few years after the pandemic (which is still raging at the time of this writing), there is strife and deep division everywhere, and the teenagers are killing themselves by the dozens, then hundreds, then…you get the idea. 

As if the climate change that runs throughout the book weren’t enough, there is the opioid epidemic: “A factory worker in Pittsburgh goes to the doctor for his trick knee and comes out with a bottle of pills. Six months later, her has sold all his furniture and is buying pills in ones and twos from the back of a used Toyota.” There are memes that only teenagers can understand, and Simon Oliver is trying to recover from his sister Claire’s suicide. He, along with a woman named Louise and a man called The Prophet, set out to find a man known as The Wizard. OK, that’s when I lost it. Or it lost me. 

Maybe I’m just not the demographic? I’m not a teen and I’m not a big fan of sci-fi. Although this one falls into the “close enough to reality to be REALLY scary” category, it still wasn’t for me. I guess the “feverish foresight” mentioned in the publisher’s blurb just wasn’t enough. In any case, Hawley can definitely write and I will grab his next book as soon as it is available…but Anthem and I just weren’t a match! Two stars.