Review of Mall

[Megan Marie 1]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Mall" by Pattie Palmer-Baker.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Have you ever thought of what it would be like to live in a perfect world? Where everybody is beautiful and unique, the only law you have to adhere to is to make sure you make enough time every day to engage in some kind of entertainment. No one has felt sadness or any negative feeling in over 300 years all thanks to the "pharms" that are easily obtained, and, they are nonaddictive so there's no reason not to admin the pharms to enhance your sex life, to never feel lonely, as well as other feelings that brings the need to want to be numb. With all of that and more, who would ever want to leave a place like that? In Mall by Patti Palmer-Bakerson, we are shown just what that life would look like, the shallowness of the people living in this type of world and what happens when someone from the world we know accidentally walks through a portal into this tempting but dangerous world.

Sara is shopping one day when she accidentally walks through a portal into Mall. The first person she has any interaction with is Nona who is the top-earning Mental Health Practitioner in Mall. Throughout the book, you see how shallow and selfish people can be, and the length some people will go to for instant acceptance and inclusion. You also see that when someone finally has their eyes opened to what is going on around them they start to realize that their life isn’t as glamorous as it seemed.

Mall has a slow start to it, you're introduced to Nona the head MHP and Natalie who is a patient of Nona's but she is a minor player until later in the book. Sara, Nona, Paul, and Royce are the main characters in the book. Throughout Mall, you start to see similarities between our reality and the Mallites reality. For example, the Mallites use "pharms" to numb any unpleasant feeling, and even though for them they are legal, do we not do the same thing with antidepressants or even illegal street drugs? Palmer-Bakerson has imagined another world where everything is superficially perfect until someone from another world comes and exposes the perfectness for what it really is.

Mall has an erotic tone to it about halfway through, so I don't recommend this book for anyone under the age of 16. It has a small religious tone to it but for most of the book, religion is not something discussed throughout the book.

I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. The writing of the book was an issue for me, there were many spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as words that were missing making some of the sentences confusing. Palmer-Bakerson didn’t do a good job explaining a lot of the lingo that the Mallites use, so the reader gets confused easily and can’t understand what the characters are referring to. Overall though Patti Palmer-Bakerson has written a decent book that is unique in the dystopian, and sci-fi genres.

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Mall
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