Review: "None of This Is Serious" by Catherine Prasifka

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka
Published April 2022 via Canongate
★★

Sophie is recently graduated, refreshing social media and waiting for something to happen. In love with her fuckboy-to-end-all-fuckboys best friend, she refreshes his social media pages to see who he's shagging and whether she might have a chance. A crack shudders through the sky, and Sophie refreshes social media to see what the self-proclaimed experts are saying about it.

None of This Is Serious is clearly part story, part social commentary, but I'd had well enough of Sophie and her cohort by midway through the book. It's hard to say that this is plot-driven (crack aside, not all that much happens), but at the same time there's not all that much development by way of characters either—they fall in and out of relationships and in and out of bed, but I don't know that I can look at any given character here and say that there's any real growth from beginning to end.

Though this is, as it is meant to be, definitively modern (watch as Sophie refreshes social media yet again), it's heavy on symbolism and light on...most other things. Not my cup of tea—the eagerness I started with turned tepid and then stone-cold as the book went on, and as Sophie refreshed social media. Again.