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Sep 03, 2017lostintheshelves rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Most people will love or hate this book (acclaimed in many rave reviews as the first Occupy Wall Street novel); I read it in part out of curiosity to see which camp I would fall in. Lim refuses most novelistic conventions—so while the story begins and ends with the friendship of two Asian-American comic book lovers, most of the middle consists of conversations about art, capitalism, and protest among Frank Exit, a broke Korean-American Batman, and his superhero friends as they hang out in Thai restaurants and karaoke bars between adventures. It's deliberately confusing who is speaking in each first-person chapter, and Lim teases the reader to figure out the connections between them. The real protagonist is the question of whether protesting capitalism in our market-driven world is possible, worthy, futile, or all of the above. At its best—when riffing on gentrification in a hospital cafeteria, or Japanese-American Black Panther member/FBI informant Richard Aoki—the book reminded me of the essays of Rebecca Solnit. Ultimately I found the lack of narrative, plot, and resolution frustrating, but I'm glad to have read it and will keep pondering its themes. It sent me scrambling to lithub.com to read reviews and learn what others had thought.