Mania, a review by Joanna

Pearson Converse is an English lecturer at a small university at a time when the Mental Parity movement has overtaken America, with the seductive notion that all human brains are equal so no one can be smarter than anyone else. Tests are outlawed, the supposedly intelligent are shunned, whole swathes of fiction and media are disappeared due to problematically gifted main characters, and you can lose your job for using the wrong word. Pearson and her best friend Emory, a TV journalist, are happy to mock the system in private, until one goes too far and faces losing everything.

This book certainly won’t be for everyone – the humour is vicious and the subtle mockery of many aspects of modern culture relentless. The premise seems far-fetched, until you think about cancel culture and the hysteria unleashed on social media – and therefore the increasingly feeble news media, every time a celebrity “fat-shames” or “slut-shames” anyone. The “heroine” is not likeable – an intellectual snob, despite repeatedly protesting her own relatively low intelligence, she uses a lot of big words (yay for the search function on my Kindle that allows me to look up their meanings) and selected the father of her artificially inseminated children based solely on his IQ score and Japanese ethnicity. I still thought this was very clever, as the predictably disastrous consequences of the movement play out on a National level, but I didn’t know how it would all end.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Harper Collins for the ARC.