Review: Sinless, Sarah Tarkoff
Sarah Tarkoff’s Sinless has some wonderful points, but at the same time, it’s hard to get through without some mixed reactions.
At the end of the day, this reviewer is still not sure what to make of Sarah Tarkoff’s Sinless, sent my way by Harper Voyager. The Arrow writer is making the jump into literature with this debut, and it seems fairly obvious that Tarkoff took cues from TV in the structure of her novel, just in how the book is divided into chapters and so on. That’s not a problem, really. In fact, the concept she’s working with — a religiously-oriented dystopia, just not as flat-out horrifying as The Handmaid’s Tale — is an intriguing one.
It’s just that the defining note of this dystopia is that if you do something bad, your Punishment (which is said to be divine, and yes, it’s capitalized) is pretty much instantaneous, and it makes you less physically attractive. Ergo, if you look good, you are therefore a good person.
Which is … mildly thorny, to say the least. And this isn’t to say that Tarkoff’s main character, Grace Luther, doesn’t wrestle with the horrendous possibility that pretty people could be bad. She does. Tarkoff is even presumably attempting to make a point about this and coming from a TV writer who works on a show where the lead is, well, Stephen Amell, who can do things like this, it feels particularly pointed.
But before Grace starts to figure out what’s going on in the world, it’s particularly hard to get through her story. Perhaps it’s just that it took me about five seconds to pick out where Grace’s name came from: her father is a former minister (all religions have been replaced, at least officially, by Great Spirit, no The necessary, which is a minor fault, but it’s just so awkward), so grace is about the most obvious name you could give. Then Tarkoff appears to have made a shout-out to Martin Luther and his most famous namesake, Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom were Christians. And theologically speaking, Great Spirit owes a lot to the dominant Western religions. I don’t think we’re supposed to like Grace, necessarily, and that’s fine.
It just doesn’t make the experience any more enjoyable. As I said, I think Tarkoff is attempting to make some pretty salient points here. “What is beauty? What is faith?” the back of the book explicitly asks. Tarkoff’s answers end up being a bit muddled.
And yet there’s some tantalizing bits here, particularly in the form of the conceit than an older Grace is looking back and is writing from prison. (It’s literally right before the prologue; ergo, it’s not a spoiler.)
Next: 30 books to watch for in the first half of 20118
So yes, at the end of the day I’m still not sure if I necessarily liked Sinless, but I am intrigued, and that might be the goal anyway.