It all seems to be lumped in together as "PC bullshit" and "identity politics taken too far" and I just .

The toing and froing between the present and the past is really enjoyable; it enables Rothfuss to tell lots of stories with their own narrative arcs, as well as weaving them together into a more epic, overarching story. As he tries to fumble his way through the mine field of press statements and a rather irritating pathologist (honestly, she genuinely thought that this information was NOT of major importance to a criminal investigation?All of this is a bit of a shame, because when I was able to push aside my instictive squicky response to a white man writing satire about sexual assault and gender politics, I really enjoyed this book. Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn’t ‘get’ a single thing about anything anymore.

The singular murder of Sammy leads Mike to the realization that the world has literally left him behind in ways he can not fully comprehend and reveals how ‘unwoke’ he is or is perceived to be. This satire of identity politics and media manipulation must be effective because readers on both the left and right think it’s unfair to them. They rush to catch the killer, who’s knocking off people who were present in each seemingly separate story line.As Rothfuss is fond of a simile (or seventy billion), this is like fish and chips: it’s filling, it’s familiar, it’s something you have as a treat because you recognise it’s not very nutritious and, despite that, you enjoy it so much you keep going back for more. Instead we get what feels like a very strangely timed book, with a cast of some real, some fake, and some thinly veiled characters. A mathematician spinning the numbers to influence public opinion, a world-weary police officer struggling to keep up with inclusivity as well as other small cogs in this magnified melting pot of rage look so like our own world that it's hard to believe this is simply fiction. It did give a look at how mad our society has become and how our outrage is manipulated by hashtags and how lots of us struggle to understand the changing way we identify gender.