Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradburry

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradburry

159 pages

Synopsis: Guy Montag lives in a futuristic society where banned books are burned. He himself is a fireman, a person who is responsible for doing just that. However one day, he meets a girl named Clarisse who challenges him to question things and changes his life forever. 

★ ★ stars

I had really high hopes for this book. Like, really high hopes. And while the premise, and general idea of this novel was incredibly interesting and full of potential, unfortunately I didn't like this book at all. 

First off, I absolutely didn't like Guy at all. He was an incredibly boring protagonist and I just personally couldn't relate to anything he did. I do understand that Montag lives in a society where basically everyone is discouraged from having any original thoughts whatsoever, and that his personality and thoughts would have been incredibly influenced by that, I would have expected this to change once Montag started being a "Rebel". 

On top of that, the writing was incredibly confusing and also just generally not very well written. Some words and quotes were absolutely amazing and absolutely quotable, and I did really appreciate and savor those moments. However, the general sentence structures used in this book felt incredibly choppy, and for a good part of reading it, I actually thought that Fahrenheit 451 was actually originally written in a foreign language and then translated into English. 

Spoilers ahead.

The concept of the book was really interesting though. So much could have been done with it, but I felt incredibly disappointed and let down with the plot. The characters were also extremely one-dimensional, even the ones at the end who were technically supposed to be the "thinkers" and "readers" or whatever. 

I did really like Clarisse though. She was the most interesting character by far, and I was incredibly disappointed when I found out that she had been killed. For a good part of the book, I hoped that maybe she had escaped as well, and had gone to live with the other rebels as well, but nope.