REVIEW: The Circle by Dave Eggers
When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge. (Via Goodreads)
Review
The Circle created a fascinating world to explore and a very interesting situation for the main character Mae to be in but it ultimately falls due to a lackluster story. Eggers seems to be so fixated on the idea of the company 'The Circle,' with all its possibilities and intricacies that the actual plot is almost an afterthought. The plot is flimsy and largely pointless with most every event only serving as a reason to move on to the next facet of 'The Circle' Eggers wants to explore.
I suspect I would have enjoyed The Circle as a whole more if it had been narrated by a different reader for the audiobook. Eggers clearly has an affinity for the narrator Dion Graham as he has read 14 of the 20 English language audiobooks Eggers has on Audible. Graham has a fantastic deep voice and a velvety smooth way of reading, the problem with his narration in this case is that The Circle is told from the perspective of Mae, a 24 year old Caucasian female. Hearing Graham's very deep, very manly voice reading the thoughts of a young girl created a huge disconnect for me as a listener. This disconnect was made worse by the incredibly poor decision Graham made to adopt a high, girlish tone when speaking Mae's dialogue. This "girly" voice was uncomfortable to hear and further pointed out the disparity of Graham's normal voice reading Mae's inner thoughts.
Despite the disparity between the strength of the world and the strength of the plot I would rate The Circle as a 3-star book, but with the less than ideal narration the audiobook specifically would only rate 2-stars overall. For the purpose of this review I have split the difference and given it 2.5 stars overall.
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