3.5 — What I love most about Powers' novels is how he evokes a sense of wonder. He so often shows in his work that a scientific appreciation of nature, history, music, etc ought only to deepen our curiosity and amazement with these facets of our world. In Bewilderment I often felt that these same themes were being wielded a bit bluntly. The transparent stand-ins for Trump, Greta Thunberg, TEDx, and other social media content machines also cheapened the book a bit in my estimation.

Many have criticized Powers in the past for thin characters that are only meant to serve the concepts of the novel. Interestingly I felt like this book had the reverse problem — I was much more engaged by the personal struggles of Robin and Theo than I was by the larger ecological disaster we're all trying to sort out.

I was astounded with how effectively Powers

Spoiler

seeded and executed the parallels to Flowers for Algernon.

I fully did not realize what he was building towards until right before the hammer fell, and that really got me.