The first thing about Walkaway that you may notice is the name of main character. It’s (and I’m not kidding): Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza. Mates renamed him to Hubert, Etc.
This is just the beginning of this fascinating story, as it weaves its way through a century, showing the changes to society and how humans suffer through them and those consequences.
It is moving, dark, funny, but also scary. There is an underlying realism in Mr. Doctorow’s novel that adds another layer to it. This is where the novel succeeds in being more than just an SF thriller, but also a statement of where we might go, if we do not take care now.

This is a really hard book to review, but on the other hand - I loved it.

It's not an easy book to read; I'm a reader who'll make her way through the average novel in half a day, and this took me a solid week. It's not a book you can skim or speed read through - every so often, in the middle of an escape or situating into a new moment, a character will begin a soliloquy. If you're not paying attention, it's easy to lose track.

The world of Walkaway is all too easy to see developing around us even now - it's one of the more plausible paths the future could be heading to. Automation abounds, the gap between rich and poor has widened drastically, and society, as a whole, is on the edge of revolution. More and more people are just walking away, bringing the "defaults" closer to the tipping point where they will have to act, or lose their majority.

This book made me think, constantly, with every new scenario raised. I'll be mulling it over for some time, and I really can see this one taking it's place in the ranks of the classics, to be discussed, and fought about, and analysed for years to come.

I was provided with a copy of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review