In case you missed it, I work at Penguin Random House, and I’m an employee ambassador.
The ambassadors have a book club, and our first pick was The Compound by Aisling Rawle. I’d heard it pitched as Love Island meets The Hunger Games, so I was intrigued and looking forward to picking it up.
Yet this book fell flat for me on account of its unlikeable main character Lily—the most unlikeable character I’ve read all year, if not one of the most unlikeable characters I’ve ever read.
Read my review below, which is also up on The StoryGraph!
1. The Compound
By Aisling Rawle
Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Winner takes all.
Lily—a bored, beautiful twentysomething—wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, such as champagne and lipstick, and communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.
The cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?
Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.
Review:
★★★
Lily is beyond an unlikeable, frustrating main character. Two thirds of the way through, I wanted to speed read to the end to get out of her head.
Don’t get me wrong. I can appreciate unreliable and unlikeable main characters. If I’m stuck in their head for almost 300 pages, though, I need secondary characters that add to my reading experience. In this case, Jacintha (Lily’s closest ally in the compound) could’ve acted as a foil character to Lily, but she had minimal page time and brief dialogue. Instead, we got Tom. Don’t get me started on Tom.
On the other hand, Lily serves as reflection to how so many refuse to engage with and think critically of the current state of the world in favor of comfortability—from the genocide in Gaza to abductions of our neighbors to ICE concentration camps. I can appreciate the book’s commentary on our society and how we’re ignorant and un-empathetic through Lily’s character.
While the book hints at so many problems of our society—racism, violence against women, capitalism, and, of course, the umbrella over it all: white supremacy—the book is anything but heavy handed. If the book offered more than these measly hints and offered more substantive commentary, I think it would’ve distinguished itself as a must-read, and I personally would’ve gotten more out of it and potentially given it 5 stars.
Let me know if you’ve read or plan to read this book so we can vent together!
Morgan Vega 