The excellent art enhances the text, giving it all a great sense of scale, awe, dread, and wonder. Something is happening, and you’re not sure why or how, but it is big, and it is coming. If I had to pin a genre down, I would say this is a horror story. These brief snapshots of the world tend to raise more questions than they answer. More and more, advertisements and corporate infrastructure dominate the landscape, stark in contrast to the wilderness and open road. Their journey is tense as they pass wrecks of giant robots, airships, and abandoned suburbia, with Michelle occasionally teasing out the events of the decline. The story follows her and a robot named Skip as they make their way to the West Coast following a map to… something. Physically larger than a typical hardcover book, most pages within are dominated by wide scenic vistas of a state in decline, beset by a slow moving catastrophe only mentioned in passing by the narrator, a teenage girl named Michelle. NPR Best Books of 2018 A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Ready. Part art book, part novella, “The Electric State” by Simon Stålenhag is a fascinating and bleak look into a bizarre alternate history 90s America.
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