I should’ve trusted my initial impression when I started this book and hated it on the first page for saying “the boy is talking, I’m the one asking questions” (paraphrased). Listen, if you can’t write first person without devolving into Wattpad territory, just don’t. Better yet: don’t write a book if you lack any talent.

Anyway, after that I once again got gaslit by the hype, so that I’d convince myself something so amazing would come out of this. I waited and waited and waited… only to be bored out of my mind as early as 60%. The illusion came crashing down when I noticed the characters insisted going on in circles instead of going forward. There’s only a certain amount of stalling you can get away with in a book before it starts looking like you  are trying to reach the word count. And Schweblin goes out of her way to drag and stretch this mediocre idea out until it’s become so thin it’s falling apart. To crown this wonderful achievement in lacking substance, the book arrives at nothing! It’s just pesticides apparently! You go through this meandering and repetitive mess, only to arrive at pesticides. TALK about anticlimactic endings. Please for the love of God decide what book you want to write, because you’re not writing a sociocultural criticism if you bury it under postmodern form experimentations in which you say practically nothing, and you’re not writing some cryptic story if it all comes down to pesticides killing people or deforming foetuses.

I also don’t get why this was retitled as Fever Dream instead of Rescue Distance, especially when nothing about this book ever feels feverish. It feels all over the place, but it’s always so painfully sober that it could never feel like a fever dream.

I waited 5 days to write this review and now I’m regretting it, because I can’t channel my initial furious monologue about this crap. Just know that I wished incredible ill on everyone involved in this zero effort fake-deep piece of shit.