LikedWould I recommend this? 100% because of that moment itself, just what it gave me, how it made me think and how it made me question not only myself but the characters as well in this world.
Review 1 of 3
All That We See or Seem (2025)
Creators: Disliked Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at fourteen as the “orphan hacker,” is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a Boston suburb. But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s waking dream and providing an emotionally resonant and narrative experience. While attendees’ dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also providing a one-on-one dream experience for the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding his dreams in return for Elli. Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.
Liked
DislikedI just didn't find the characters interesting and I definitely did not find the plot that compelling. It almost becomes this who done it chase, you know, hacking kind of novel and it also just felt way too long.
Review 1 of 2
DislikedThis bookis at best a long winded mystery that in my opinion kind of chased its tail,trying to build backstory and then go back to the mystery and then buildbackstory and then go back to the mystery in such a circular pattern thatI ended up not really loving the story.
DislikedHowever, as a whole, I found the story to be quite lackluster. Quite frankly, I just found it to be very average in terms of the writing, the plot, everything felt very familiar and tropey and not particularly interesting or elevated.
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Max BarryAt an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets,” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.
Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. Drawn in to their strage world, which is populated by people named Brontë and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skilful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.
Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an “outlier,” immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.
A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry’s most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Mixed reactions from creators9 reviews- Also mystery and science fiction85%
- A creator reacted alike14%
- Similar descriptions1%