Review by Booklist Review
As the world steadily becomes uninhabitable, a select few are invited to join completely sealed enclaves through the Inside project. But the New York City Inside, funded by billionaire women's rights activist Jacqueline, is secretly being designed as an experimental society that seeks to eradicate the patriarchy in a single generation. In this inventive novel, Korn (Everybody Else Is Perfect, 2021) follows three people whose lives are forever altered by the promise and peril of Inside. Shelby drops out of school and leaves her family to be Jacqueline's assistant in the confines of a space station. Ava splits with her girlfriend, Orchid, when she is accepted into Inside, but Orchid is not. Olympia becomes Inside's medical director after she's targeted for doxing by a men's rights group. Prioritizing plot over character development, Korn has developed an immersive, future-focused, and highly engaging thought experiment that's startlingly relevant to today's society. As the drawbacks and blind spots of Jacqueline's particular brand of capitalist feminism bend toward ever more ghastly outcomes over decades, each woman must decide whether safety is worth her price.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Korn makes her fiction debut (after the essay collection Everybody (Else) Is Perfect) with an alluring story of a feminist dystopia. It's 2050, and unchecked climate change has caused civilization to crumble amid dangerous storms and disappearing coastal areas. The story unfolds through intersecting narratives of various women. Among them are Shelby, who is accompanying her billionaire boss Jacqueline Millender on a space shuttle orbiting Earth, and Ava, who gains acceptance to Jacqueline's city-size Inside Project, a series of weather-resistant tunnels in New York City that allow people to move between buildings without exposure to the worsening climate. Korn also portrays life on Earth for the less fortunate, including Ava's ex-girlfriend, Orchid, who is forced to fend for herself on the dying planet. As a member of Inside, Ava lets her life be designed and controlled by Jacqueline. There are no men allowed into the tunnels, as Jacqueline has determined that the planet can only be healed by eliminating the patriarchy. Before the end, though, Ava uncovers the dark side of Jacqueline's vision for populating the next generation. Korn's conceits are as provocative as her characters are well-rounded. Readers will eat up this distinctive work of climate fiction. (Dec.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT With climate change ravaging the Earth in 2050, the world builds Insides--fortified communities where a select few can survive the apocalypse. Billionaire Jacqueline, author of the female empowerment manifesto Yours for the Taking, funds one Inside in exchange for the ability to turn it into her own experimental, woman-led utopia. Her increasingly destructive obsession with recreating society in her image distorts the lives of her assistant Shelby, doctor Olympia, and Inside resident Ava, until a series of unanticipated crises reveal the fault lines in Jacqueline's perfect world. This novel skewers the ways some cisgender white feminists ally with existing power structures as long as the "right" people end up on top. Its commentary is relevant, but the narrative's preference for telling over showing keeps the protagonists at a distance, leaving central relationships underdeveloped. While the outcome of Jacqueline's experiment is never in doubt, the details of her feminist dystopia provide an intriguing exploration of how "saving the world" can become warped by ego and ideology. VERDICT Korn's (Everybody (Else) Is Perfect) timely fiction debut indicts exclusionary corporate feminism.--Erin Niederberger
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A feminist multibillionaire's solution to a climate change--induced housing crisis comes with a dark underbelly in this debut novel. Ava is a white 20-something trying to stay afloat in 2050s New York City. Opportunities--and the island itself--are shrinking, so when applications to the Inside Project go live, both she and her girlfriend jump through all number of hoops to apply. Greenlit by the United World Government and funded in part by the enormously wealthy tech innovator Jacqueline Millender, Inside is supposed to provide state-of-the-art insulated housing for three million people selected by lottery. When Ava alone is chosen to go Inside, she starts on a path that will intersect with two other women--Shelby, Jacqueline's white, trans assistant, and Olympia, Inside's Black, queer medical director--and reveal how much the program is shaped by Jacqueline's personal desires and willful ignorance. Korn's premise couldn't be more timely, mining ecological anxieties and the disappointments of girlboss feminism, but the novel's engaging opening act doesn't provide enough structural support for the back half. Despite regularly deployed reveals, the novel rarely surprises, seeming more interested in taking Jacqueline to task on the page than making her a compelling villain. Each point-of-view character is allowed serious relationships (romantic, familial, or friendly) with a maximum of three people, which gives a book ostensibly about community a very lonely feeling. While the point of Inside may be its unsustainability, the lack of thought about basic functionality (Olympia realizes, 43 chapters in, that there are no codified rules against romantic relationships between Inside medical staff and residents) becomes an indictment of the author as well as the characters. Like the woman at its center, this novel sparkles with interesting ideas but struggles to delve deeper. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
