In the book plastic by Scott Gill we meet Aaron her sister is missing her dad has recently died from Brad Pitt disease… Which I still don’t know what that is and they have environmental terrorist who have become violent she also recently lost the love of her life and has been dating from an app on Friday nights to avoid loneliness. Meeting Jacob however puts an in to that she also is a big fan of a Netflix type show call nuclear family where the lead star is in love with a waffle boy who is an actual waffle and a boy. There’s also musical scenes in the book and lots of other stuff. My point is this book was OK I didn’t like how they spoke it sounded like they were all from The same land the Cookie Monster comes from a really would love to say I love this book but I did not I don’t know why they were plastic I don’t know what Brad Pitts diseases I don’t know how nuclear family ended I just didn’t like the book that much, I also couldn’t put the Barbie type people and such a terrible situation And take it seriously but they are those who love the book but then again they were people who drink the Kool-Aid as well. I want to thank the publisher for my free arc copy via NetGalley please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

Plastic sounded like a really interesting, new premise for a book. It did a good job of making (literal) hollow, plastic characters develop in a way that made the relationships something to be invested in. I wasn't a *huge* fan of switching back and forth between Erin and Nuclear Family, but it wasn't that big a deal. The biggest issue I had was the broken dialogue. Again, I understand the reasoning for it. But it got exhausting to read after a little while.

huh! i can confidently say i’ve never read anything like this.. it’s satirical social commentary that was pretty funny but at times a little too on the nose..

written like a play of a tv show but it’s a book!?

I was really intrigued by the concept of this story and the world/concept is very interesting but the wiring was a miss for me. The dialogue of the characters is so hard to read. I understand it's a bold stylistic choice but for me it didn't pay off. The stilted and simplistic speech patterns really too me out of the story as I tried to make sure I was accurately deciphering what the characters meant and it ultimately made this feel like work.

Maybe it would be better in audio.

"Plastic" by Scott Guild is a brilliantly original debut novel that seamlessly weaves surreal humor with profound insights into our current climate of gun violence and environmental decay. In this imaginative tale, we follow Erin, a plastic girl navigating a plastic world where Smartbodies offer an escape from reality's harsh truths. When a terror attack disrupts her routine, Erin finds solace in Jacob, a blind figurine, and together they embark on a journey through virtual landscapes. As they confront their own traumas, Erin's hidden past threatens to shatter their newfound connection. With its blend of dystopian satire and heartfelt exploration, Guild's novel offers a uniquely inventive perspective on the fragility and resilience of modern society.

This book is difficult to categorize, blending elements of dystopian fiction with surreal humor and a unique ecoterrorism twist. If I had to pin it down, I would call it "dystopian Barbie" Characters range from sentient waffles to a plastic Jesus that comes alive, and the narrative delves into themes of war, terrorism, surveillance, and drug use. The characters grapple with severe trauma, yet the novel still finds humor in their interactions and societal dynamics. Framed as TV show episodes, complete with camera angles and musical numbers, each chapter adds to the eccentricity of the story. The dialogue is unconventional, resembling a futuristic form of texting/baby talk. Despite its unconventional approach, "Plastic" tackles significant topics such as eco-terrorism, technology, climate change, grief, and trauma, making it a memorable and thought-provoking read.

I don’t know how to describe this book. Like at all, even a little bit. Some characters are waffles. Waffles that are alive and behave as humans. There’s a plastic Jesus that comes to life. Furry cubes kill themselves a lot. Virtual reality beyond all imagination now. And that’s just barely scratching the surface. War, terrorism, surveillance state, drugs. This book will unsettle you. It will be impossible to put down and also impossible to keep reading without wondering what is going on, why, if you understand it or even if that matters.

I DNFed at 50% and skimmed the last chapter to see what the ending looked like. I was captured right away by the plastic war stricken world, the smartbodies virtual reality, and the Nuclear Family sitcom. I was waiting for Erin to have a mission and for these three worlds to mesh together but if it ever does it would have to be after the half way point, which I just don't see happening. The imagining of future technologies, religions, and customs made the read fun but I don't think the author intended for the story to have a fun message. It is like the book "Who Moved My Cheese", a story about a mouse searching in new places of the maze for his cheese while the other mice stick to their old route, which ends up being a metaphor on business practices. Plastic is a metaphor on global warming, on nuclear war, and other similar political issues. I was hoping for something with more of a hero's journey plot.

She is a Barbie girl, living in plastic world...in the cloud... Cannot do that without putting her VR goggles. Is it how we are going to be soon? Is this Simpsons of the books telling us what will happen when we are laughing at it now? Why eco-conscious people would turn lethal methods to spread their message? Will we become that oblivious?

I don't know if I should be uncomfortable reading this book or laugh out loud. I feel bad for Erin. I don't see anything about her life that would crack me up. She is just like any other lonely person looking for solace in something. I feel bad for Fiona. She got pulled into a cause without really realizing consequences of it. She is not so different than her sister in naïveté. Everyone in this book is living a type of broken life whether it's physical or emotional.

Yet... it's still funny: the way they speak, the way they interact, how they rate each other, how they are still classist. It's a quite interesting take on apocalyptic dystopia. I hope when ours is here, we won't be the shells of people that we see here.

Currently experiencing an emotional hangover — I never thought I would have so many feelings reading about plastic people!

This book is so many things — Original. Thought-provoking. Sad. Funny. Absurd. Mysterious.

To properly set the scene for this, I’m going to need you to temporarily suspend disbelief…

In ‘Plastic’ by Scott Guild, we are in a dystopia where instead of humans, everyone is plastic [think Barbie movie minus the light-heartness]. People can transport themselves to other virtual worlds through Smartbodies, suffer from illnesses called Brad Pitt disease, are under intense government surveillance/oppression, and are facing constant eco-terrorist attacks.

The story centers on Erin as she experiences a terror attack at work. Responding to a Good Samaritan act of service, she meets Jacob, legally blind, who realizes his mother has been killed in the attack. This traumatic meeting plants the seeds for their connection but Erin faces difficulty opening up as she has many secrets about her past including her connection to these terrorist attacks.

“Oh God, I pray, don’t let the rage consume me. Don’t let it smother the love that I have left.”

This story will require your focus but it is worth the pay-off. I had my doubts if I would be able to fully connect to this story but the level of detachment you feel from the characters physically [cause they are plastic] and their language [which is chipped and a bit robotic] is compensated in the emotional connections.

I loved the split between Erin’s life and the chapters that were scenes from the TV sitcom where Erin escapes. This distant world felt very familiar, making me sad and laugh and self-reflect. They find ways to survive grief, anxiety, and fear. They cope with their traumas by escaping through TV, medication, and alcohol. Many suffer in silence not wanting to burden others.

The serious topics don’t force you to conclude any specific opinions which I appreciated. Just a mirror into a world, that is not too far from the one we’re living in.

Memorable debut! Thank you, Pantheon for the gifted copy! You will now find me staring into a wall.

A wild wild book. Not sure it’ll be for everyone but it includes a dystopian climate crisis, a tv show of the past, and a future where language is cut short where the mc witnesses a shooting. I didn’t always know what was going on but the twist of what the tv show represents was great.

Published by Pantheon on February 13, 2024

Sometimes, after the fifth or sixth time I’ve said to myself “I’m not sure I like this book,” I stop reading it. I persevered with Plastic. A mix of engaging moments and wtf moments convinced me that my continued attention was warranted, but in the end, my reaction remains: I’m not sure I like this book.

Erin seems to be living in a television show, or perhaps she views her life that way. Chapters start with “In this scene,” followed by a description of Erin’s activities, presumably narrated by Erin. She watches a popular television show (Nuclear Family, a show about post-apocalyptic teen angst in which some of the characters are waffles or robots) and talks to friends about their membership in the Church of Divine Acceptance, a pseudo-religion that equates faith with technology (“No God or weird stuff there.”).

Conjugations of “to be” and other bits of conventional sentence structure have disappeared in Erin’s post-apocalyptic world (“How Owen doing? He back home now?” is answered “He just get out hospital”), although Erin speaks fluidly when she narrates her life. The language change seems odd given that kids still play Marco Polo (words that seem more likely to disappear than “is” and “of”). But the kids are made of plastic, so any additional oddness is comparatively easy to accept.

Ah yes, the plastic. Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier. Erin and her friends are plastic “figurines.” Maybe they only feel like they are plastic (a final scene suggests they might really have skin made of flesh), although they repair injuries to their bodies with Wound Glue. They seem human in most other respects, including the pleasure they take in alcohol, drugs, and sex. Erin sometimes orders a Hot Date when she wants to get laid, although her Smartbody can give her an equivalent experience with a virtual hookup.

Erin spent her inheritance on a Smartbody to help her avoid the reality of terrorism, global warming (the “heat leap”) caused by burning chicken bones as fuel, and the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. She escapes into a virtual reality called Smartworld.

Erin uses virtual reality to recreate Patrick, who died in front of her in a high school terrorism incident. She even gives herself a virtual pregnancy until she becomes angry and clicks the menu for a virtual abortion. Later in the story, Erin will develop a relationship with Jacob, a blind figurine.

Erin’s sister disappeared a terrorist bombing. Her father died of Brad Pitt disease (and perhaps of a broken heart after his boyfriend left him). In the virtual world, Erin receives unwanted warnings that caution her to avoid terrorist attacks. She suspects she knows the source of the warnings but doesn’t want to confirm her suspicions. On the other hand, not reporting the warnings will have its own consequences, including (at the least) being placed on a watch list by the oppressive government that tries to keep everyone under constant surveillance. That’s easy when people spend most of their lives getting high and living in a virtual world.

My impression is that Scott Guild excelled in creative writing classes. Plastic is certainly creative, but the novel feels like a series of gimmicks — interesting gimmicks, to be sure — that never quite cohere into a whole that is equal to, much less greater than, the sum of its parts. I didn’t become absorbed in the reality that Guild built, perhaps because I never quite saw its point. The metaphor of people living plastic lives seems a bit obvious. Still, Plastic might encourage readers to see quasi-religion, the risks of totalitarian government, terrorism, virtual reality, and the other topics that animate the story in a new light. Barring that, the story has some entertainment value, even if it doesn’t promote emotional engagement with its plastic characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I am ending my NetGalley journey with the book Plastic by Scott Guild at 25%, not because I don't like the story, but because the barrier to read a story like Plastic is a step too high. What I mean by that is the writing style. I understand why Scott Guild would chose to write an AI like world in short script, weird grammar and sentence structures that miss entire words; it fits the story and again, it's a good story. But, for a reader like me, who needs the correct spelling and those missing words, it's not an easy read. I've chosen to switch to the audiobook version before writing my Goodreads review because again, I like the story, but this book is quite-literally not written so every single person can read it.

Side note, I don't have dyslexia but my daughter does. I asked her to read a chapter. She physically couldn't get through it. In the future, that may be something to think about.

This book was so odd...

I am a huge fan of what other people would consider "weird" books but this one was just too much. Having to read from these non-human characters with intentional broken English throughout the ENTIRE book was, to put it simply, insufferable. Would have been less annoying if there was less dialogue, but there was A TON of dialogue. The plot was also just not interesting to me and felt so disconnected, especially with the changes in narrative.

The only reason I am giving this 2 stars instead of a 1 star rating is because of originality. I commend Scott Guild for writing something unlike anything I have ever read before, however I am not sure it paid off in the end unfortunately.

This book is very interesting. Dystopian Barbie with an ecoterrorism twist. I’m not sure it feels entirely flushed out, though. Kind of a lot of topics shoved into one not-too-long book, which I do like because I feel like books have been too long and not edited enough these days, but I have to say I could have taken a bit more of this story overall. I got a little lost in the middle and felt like there were kind of a lot of characters to keep track of. But overall this book was super interesting and it would make a super epic miniseries or movie.

Plastic is a wildly creative and unique book that manages to do so much through its absurdist premise. It’s bizarre, entertaining, and somehow it works. Thank you to Netgalley for the early review copy, Plastic is available now!

I don’t even know if I can describe the plot in a way that does it justice. Erin is a plastic “figurine” who lives in a dystopian, technologically-advanced and seemingly superficial world. But this world is a lot darker than it seems. An eco terrorist group is at large, and bombings are frequent—all of the characters have experienced the loss of a loved one, including Erin. Erin also has a secret. Her sister, Fiona, who ran away when Erin was in high school, is one of the main leaders of the terrorist group. Erin deals with the recent loss of her father and her anger at her sister by escaping into virtual reality worlds and obsessing over her favorite TV show, Nuclear Family. This is where it gets weird: the figurines only eat boiled chicken, there is a race of waffle people—yes, people who are literally waffles—and Erin breaks out into song every couple of chapters.

Each chapter is also framed as a tv show episode, complete with descriptions of camera angles and musical numbers. The dialogue is also jarring—the figurines speak to each other in an imaginary future dialogue of English that mimics text messaging, consisting of dropped nouns and babyish slang (blummo for sad, for example).

All this takes a bit to get used to as a reader, and I resented the characters at first for seeming like such airheads. But this book is as dark as it is comedic, and by the end, even the question of why each chapter is framed like a tv show episode is answered.

Tackling big topics like eco terrorism, technology, climate change, grief, trauma and more, Plastic will undoubtedly go down as one of the most surprising and memorable books I’ve ever read.

And apparently you can listen to the songs from the book on Spotify!

Plastic was weird and fun and dark all at the same time. My brain kinda hurts after reading this, but I imagine I will not stop thinking about this book for a long time. This was BIZARRE, but I love bizarre, and I loved Plastic.

I do not know quite what I was expecting when I started reading Plastic, but it was not what I thought. It is weird, dystopian, and unique. Erin is a girl made of plastic, living in a plastic world (envision Barbie, but not really- all is plastic, but not fantastic). She works at a mall at Tablet Town and on her way in one day, a bomb goes off. This is part of a string of eco-terrorist incidents plaguing the country. She answers a call of distress on her phone app and meets Jacob, a blind man who has just lost is mother in the attack. Erin and Jacob form a strong bond, through mostly a virtual world, where they wear Smartbodies. While in this virtual world, Erin is being sent messages about an upcoming large ecoterrorist attack. She tries to evade these warnings, as she does not want to get caught up in activities. You see, her sister has a history with these group and coordinated a bomb while she was in college, and since then Erin and her father have been shunned and are under surveillance.

This book is a unique blend of almost satire with a dystopian future. At times it all appears as a bit absurd, while at others, very relatable. I think this one may be polarizing for folks. I do not know what to think about the ending. Additionally, when the characters speak to one another it's in a shorthand almost like texting. This is interspersed with Erin's monologues to the audience which are not using that shorthand. Oh, and characters break out in song? This was an odd one, but way to swing for it on your debut, Scott Guild!

Thank you to Pantheon via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC! This is probably one of the most bizarre / enticing novels I've read, but it is soooo insanely good.

In a post-Barbie movie landscape, the premise of plastic dolls operating perfunctorily in their fictitious, synthetic world sounds alluring and innocuous. But Scott Guild delivers something far more complex, using his artificial characters and their plastic world and silly abbreviated dialogue as an apparatus for a message so intensive that its execution is almost comical. Guild writes of ecoterrorist groups, massacres, gun violence, climate change, grief, loss, and everything under the sun, all while crafting some ridiculous aspects of this plastic world (e.g., only eating boiled chicken, Brad Pitt Disease???). The entire time I was reading this book, I couldn't help but think how I shouldn't be laughing, how unfunny this should be just based on the plot points. But this novel's humor is as unending as its gravity. There's something so remarkable about Guild's writing and the way it so easily allows for dichotomy between utter sincerity and absurdism.

This is an instant classic for me. The insanity and creativity of this book intersected so spectacularly that reading this was like watching a supernova. The last quarter of the book was unputdownable — the pace, the twists, the writing were all perfectly aligned. By the end, I felt like I was being turned inside out and then put into a washing machine. I would highly recommend going into this book blind!!!

"Plastic" delivers an absurdist narrative with impeccable world-building. Guild's talent shines through, crafting a captivating story that navigates themes of climate change, politics, and love. Despite initial doubts about the language, the seamless connection between characters and scenes left me spellbound. This innovative novel is a must-read, leaving a lasting impression that lingers long after the final page.

𝐓𝐢𝐭𝐥𝐞: 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜
𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫: 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝
𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬: 𝐉𝐨𝐫𝐣𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐞 & 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐃𝐚𝐦𝐫𝐨𝐧
𝐏𝐮𝐛 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞: 𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟏𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒

Thank you Pantheon for my #gifted copy of Plastic!

I’ll start by saying I don’t usually read dystopian or science fiction novels. With that said, I really found Plastic to be engaging, sometimes funny, and profound. I found the premise brilliant and really appreciated how this was laid out like a movie script. While I personally had a difficult time connecting with this book, I think anyone who enjoys dystopian novels will really appreciate this one.

Posted on Goodreads on February 8, 2024: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/144922955?ref=nav_profile_l
**Posted on Instagram - Full Review- on or around February 13, 2024: http://www.instagram.com/nobookmark_noproblem
**Posted on Amazon on February 13, 2024
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