Books about billionaires feathering their climate change nests are a thing: this is the third or fourth I’ve read in the last year exploring the trope. Gabrielle Korn’s Yours For the Taking is a quick read and clever. In this foray, the antagonist tech bro is Jacqueline Millender, a bottle-blonde, lean-in TERF handed oversight by the United World Government to build and populate a post-apocalyptic New York City.
More dystopian than scifi, the novel celebrates queerness as one antidote to fascism, though never at a level deep enough to slow down the blisteringly fast pace: Zamyatin for #BookTok. Main character Ava might, if one squints, be an analog for Ofred; character Shelby’s post-events document isn’t going to be confused with The Principles of Newspeak, however. The novel’s near-YA-level superficiality and beguiling lack of pretense made it a good end-of-summer read, though. At some point someone will write Brave New World for the Anthropocene, and I’ll be here for it.
