The compound by Aisling Rawle

[Dontlletmedownbruce]

Anyone read this? It's based around a reality TV show, and described as Love Island meets Lord of the flies. I thought it was more Black Mirror.

I'd be interested to hear other views. I just finished it and am trying to decide what I think of it. It's an excellent and easy read but it's the social commentary and deeper side of it that I'm interested in hearing views on.

I read it a few weeks ago, I did enjoy it and it was an easy/quick read.
I found I didn’t like Lily as a character particularly, but I don’t think that’s the intention to like her or any of them. I was intrigued about the world beyond the compound and what that looked like.

yeah @JomonotFomo I thought Lily was awful, I tried to get into her point of view and understand why success meant so much to her but it was hard as she really was as shallow as she seemed. I liked that about this book, we don't usually read first person shallow characters! I was appalled at her near the end when she conspired re the water and the incident with Tom.

I too was curious about the world, I think it hinted at economic crisis and climate change, and war obviously was mentioned. The housing crisis too, as lily still lived at home with her mum despite a difficult relationship. It wasnt catastrophic though, as they all had good professions and seemed used to a high standard of living. It was very clever of the author to have a ban on contestants talking about their lives as she avoided filling in the blanks.

I presumed they were British but that's probably just based on Love Island, and maybe a wrong conclusion. The writer is Irish (as I am) but for some reason it never occurred to me that they were all Irish. The racial breakdown would suggest British or Irish, I thought. Possibly a combination. Lily was always English in my head for some reason. Accents were never mentioned as far as I remember.

It’s 99p on kindle today, so I will be back when I’ve read it, might be a few weeks! I love dystopian stuff usually and was intrigued when I read the blurb for this. Looking forward to it!

It was interesting to see how low they’d stoop for “things” - Lily being insistent she wanted to win was something I found very difficult o associate with, but I think that was the point, you struggled to like most of the characters.
The whole “but they won’t let us die…” whilst allowing the other stuff to happen was crazy. The horrible stuff almost seemed brushed aside at least by Lily.

Finally finished, it was a quick read that I found had decent pace and I enjoyed it.

The characters behaved exactly how I imagine things like Love Island to be away from the cameras. The obsession with acquiring stuff was great. I found myself thinking back to the early days of Big Brother, which had just normal people on, and how that changed to the wannabe stars and influencers. Lily was that vacuous, stuff- and fame-obsessed wannabe. Her real life was mundane and she was incredibly stupid, I would have been more interested in why some of the others were there, but we didn’t get a lot of their background (also very clever from the author, lots of blanks to fill in!) I didn’t believe the maths issue as presented at all though, I mean really? That was ridiculous.

I hoped things would get more extreme with it being compared to Lord of the Flies but it didn’t quite go far enough, for me.

I would have liked to know more about the world they were in, although even setting it in the present would have worked. I thought it was in the UK with the desert setting as a result of climate change. There were a few phrases early on which were very Irish though (Irish family members use this style of sentence structure, I don’t hear it from the English side), but again it didn’t matter. It could be anywhere.

I quite liked that by the end, Lily woke up to the pointless nature of consumerism. Andrew piling the stuff up as a monument (funeral pyre?) made me smile. There were some nice touches, but I would have liked the story to have gone a bit further with it all. A decent summer read though.

I agree @Anotherdaysameolddrama I think I wanted it to go further. I thought it would be more a messed up big brother style. When Susie had the challenge to poo on the floor I thought that was the moment that would change the tone and the challenges would be humiliating or dehumanising. I actually thought they might be coerced into doing sexual stuff. But Lily never really had to do anything awful, the horrible stuff she did was choice. @TennisLady I agree Lily really lacked empathy, she accepted everything without surprise. Like when Tom got scalded in the jacuzzi. I was appalled at her withholding the water like that.