Mary Parsons suffers from an unknown full-body illness that resists treatment until she tries Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia (PAKing). To pay for the expensive treatments, she finds a second job as part of a social science Girlfriend Experiment: a team of researchers divide up the various roles of a girlfriend (emotional support, mundane day-to-day tasks, maternal assistance, fights) among different women and measure the participants responses to learn how to build the perfect relationship. Mary is the Emotional Girlfriend, even though her emotional responses are somewhat odd due to her strange parents.
I appreciated that The Answers doesn't have a typical structure and that it asks big questions about who we are and what we want from relationships. However, I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from. Every character and every story strand was off-kilter, so it was hard to think about the real-world implications of its ideas. Some of its ideas were intriguing, though ("Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person").
I might take another crack at this book in a few years to see whether it fits together when I look at it from a different angle.
I appreciated that The Answers doesn't have a typical structure and that it asks big questions about who we are and what we want from relationships. However, I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from. Every character and every story strand was off-kilter, so it was hard to think about the real-world implications of its ideas. Some of its ideas were intriguing, though ("Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person").
I might take another crack at this book in a few years to see whether it fits together when I look at it from a different angle.
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