25 Perfect Days, by Mark Tullius
Paperback: 322 pages
Publisher: Vincere Press, LLC (March 15, 2013)
A totalitarian state doesn't just happen overnight. It's a slow, dangerous slide. 25 Perfect Days chronicles the path into a hellish future of food shortages, contaminated water, sweeping incarceration, an ultra-radical religion, and the extreme measures taken to reduce the population. Through twenty-five interlinked stories, each written from a different character's point of view, 25 Perfect Days captures the sacrifice, courage, and love needed to survive and eventually overcome this dystopian nightmare.
When I first read the blurb for this novel, my fear was that this book would be a polemical political story with an embarrassingly transparent agenda or a political slant. That was not at all the case. The author's not trying to make political points here for any side. It's not against any particular party or position in particular, but rather at the human race.
25 Perfect Days is a series of interlocking short stories, all occurring in a future world with invasive oppression. So often in science fiction or dystopia type stories, the status and technology of the world is overexplained in rigid exposition, but in 25 perfect days the implications of this world are revealed largely through action, dialogue, and conflict. The narrative flows through this world in the minds and voices of very real characters. The way the characters had come to, at times, fatally accept the oppression was riveting.
I found myself looking forward to each new story, and I wanted to talk back to the stories, tell them how clever they were, or if they weren't my favorite, tell them it was okay, don't take it personal, because I'm sure I will like the next story which is right around the corner. Some worked better than others, but all of them showed an author with a great mind and an author with an awesome narrative. It's one of those novels you can just tell the author is wicked smart. Great piece of work.
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