Review: Docile

Docile by K.M. Szpara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A couple of the higher-ups at my work recommended this book to me, and remembering a queer vampire short story that Szpara wrote once before that I thought was pretty good, I decided to give it a shot. And seeing a lot of my friends' reviews here, and others, I think I'm...going to give this one as middle-of-the-middle a rating as I can. Quite honestly, I'm really torn. Don't get me wrong, Szpara does make some good points about the nature of consent, and the insidious ways capitalism keeps itself up generation after generation - hell, that the very premise of this book is that there's a whole industry of people forced to sign themselves up as slaves to clear their parents' debt, and that their parents may have been Dociles themselves...oh, and of course the idea that there's a 1% of the 1% who use Dociline to make the other 99% of the 1% their friends too, that's pretty sickening. Of course, there are also reviews from black readers criticizing the use of slavery as a plot device (not to mention the fact that one of the most prominent black characters is named Onyx, like...seriously, Szpara? Then again, as much as I hate to say it, the reason I read Szpara's vampire story was because it was recommended by the notoriously messed-up Tristina Wright back when I was foolish enough to follow her on Twitter...) Honestly, I think what this book really boils down to is that it's a slavefic (and I think I saw someone say somewhere that it's basically a Harry/Draco slavefic, which is soooooooo not my ship), and I'm just too vanilla for that, I guess. Even though it did make good points, especially about consent. But it's just not five star worthy for me, I'm sorry to say.

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