Acceptance
By Jeff VanderMeer
- Release Date: 2014-09-02
- Genre: Literary Fiction
Description
The New York Times bestselling final installment of Jeff VanderMeer’s wildy popular Southern Reach Trilogy
It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it--the Southern Reach--has collapsed on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.
Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X--what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X--and who may have been corrupted by it?
In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound--or terrifying.
Reviews
If you can get past the writing style it’s an interesting mystery
3By Madame CCWI liked the trilogy, it had some creative concepts. But the writing style is comically self conscious and… patchy?There’s a lot of sentences like…”and she did, but maybe she didn’t, but maybe they all did, and maybe that was the point, if points still mattered in a world where people didn’t”. Sometimes it feels like the only thing being annihilated was the writer’s train of thought. Otherwise it was somewhat captivating.Waste of time
1By zdon1081If you are looking for a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, don’t waste your timebeautiful
5By Stells2108such a deep poetic book, that was beautifully written. really enjoyed this series read over a few days because I couldn’t stopWhat is this?
2By tc_stingThings this book lacks. A cohesive sentence. Characters with relatable emotional responses. Proper description or explanation. I get it. Super zany crazy wow alien world can’t be properly described. Or. The author isn’t very good so hoped to hide that fact by pitching out random adjectives from a thesaurus and kept at it for 500 pages. This book is bad. It just tries to mask it with vague and confusing language.It’s all downhill
1By Dawn and Derrell JamesWhat a waste - promising first book, and deterioration since...sort of like the world of Area X. No satisfying ending, just more useless existence of the characters with no resolution to what Area X actually is.Beautiful and Haunting
5By Dryas IuliaDon’t read this if you don't like: nature, mystery, people and words…or if you want someone to spoon-feed you a story. I came for the sci-fi; but I’m overwhelmed and humbled by the characters and their relationships. After I finished this I immediately ordered the compilation hard cover for my husband. Honestly it’s going to take everything I have not to sit and watch him read it like a creeper~ (I’ll probably just read it again!)It's ok
3By Wildfreesia2012It's beautifully written. It's meandering. Back and forth, back and forth, wordy, wordy, wordy. All the answers are in the story, but it's vague and makes you work, so it's too much work to be entertaining. But then, entertaining was not the author's object. It reflects this world's morbid lack of hope. I appreciate the author's love of nature. If he used the word banal one more time I think I would have been driven into that burning light myself.Not worth the time
2By aeilynnToo many one dimensional characters in a soup of confusion. The first book was good. The second really served no purpose, and the third was an exhausting climb up a loose hill of sand: lots of work for no reward.Doesn’t add to the series
1By JerbunThe first book of the series was amazing. I immediately bought the second book to find out more about the story. Then, the second book just lost that drive. Ever hopeful, I figured it would primarily be setup for a grand finale. It was not. This book almost reads like he was only going to get paid if it was a three book series. It doesn’t add almost anything to the story. The little it does add creates more questions than it answers. I think the author just came up with a lot of good ideas to provide suspense and a sense of wonderment, but never figured out why those things should exist.Dull and frustrating
1By Ian30005Well, that's about 40-hours of my life I won't get back. I found the first book interesting, but the second got bogged down, and the third was torture. It's one of those times you keep going, just in case there's an interesting conclusion. There wasn't!Unsettling Conclusion of The Southern Reach
4By Prairie_DogThe final volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy is quite far reaching. We are treated to point of view flashbacks from many of the major characters that featured prominently in the first two books. The narrative is very personal, and tells us a lot about how events unfolded. However, if you are looking for tidy explanations for everything about Area X, you will be disappointed. There are many answers, but not all of them are complete, or satisfying. Like our characters, you will simply have to practice "Acceptance" and realize that not everything that is so alien can be understood by humans.Wow
5By KarlbozemanI love reading this book, and I loved the conclusion too. It answers just enough questions without giving the whole thing away. This was definitely my favorite in the whole series!Well paced and immersive.
4By B.H. VruxThe trilogy occasionally rambles vaguely, yet in an opaque, subtle way difficult to identify, it crafted tangible feelings of dread and unease in my mind. Reading it alone in bed with the lights off was delightfully immersive; it's rare I'm drawn into a book to this extent.Jeff VanderMeer Trilogy
1By Arrghh!Very disappointing. Don't bother to waste your time reading. Rambling, incoherent, disjointed. Is Jeff planning to write some more books to sell to us that leave us full of frustration? Let's think of some really crazy idea...then let's add in some poorly developed characters and then let's have word diarrhea. Actually it would be more fun to just bang our heads against a brick wall.I will never purchase a series again
1By Techlady4160Hard to follow. Filled with ponderous nonsense. Built on a sandy foundation (hypnosis, really?). Every story thread leads nowhere. Three books filled with crap designed to get money out of you in three installations.A spectacular end
5By wholeexpanseAcceptance by Jeff VanderMeer is the final book in The Southern Reach Trilogy, and it's a perfect closing curtain. Acceptance brings back the intensely ominous feeling introduced in Annihilation, the series' first book, but on a much grander scale. Much of the story takes place in flashbacks, we're taken back to the events that took place before Annihilation, to everything that led up to the disastrous Twelfth Expedition into Area X and the subsequent shifting within the Southern Reach. We also go back to a little place called the Forgotten Coast, a place where misfits, outcasts gathered to make a home. A quaint costal village complete with a lighthouse and its gruff, but kind keeper. A rustic place, but a good place, a nice place to live until something turned it into a nightmare, a biological disaster; Area X. In this final book, by way of glimpses into life on the Forgotten Coast, we see the horrific creation of Area X. Acceptance begins with the death of a character, a death that occurs toward the end of Annihilation. We learn about her life through flashbacks, yet we also know that she is damned. We know that the Forgotten Coast is damned, that the people we learn about, grow to care about, will be lost. The horror of the book, and really, the trilogy as a whole, is witnessing this slow fall and knowing that no matter what, it won't be stopped. Though, we get to see points at which maybe if different decisions were made, Area X might not have been made. Knowing that so much loss wasn't inevitable, that it could have possibly been avoided, makes the loss that much more painful. We keep reading because we want to know the whats and the whys that birthed Area X, but also, there's still the right now, the world after the creation of Area X. That part of the story is completely uncertain, it's ultimately why I kept turning pages until a late night became an early morning. I wanted to know if our world would survive, or if Area X would envelope everything. I know, but I won't say. I don't want to say more, I don't want to make reading Acceptance pointless while trying to convey why it's so spectacular. The Southern Reach Trilogy is a masterpiece, it is brilliantly conceived and written. Acceptance is what seals the deal, it's a truly remarkable end to a beautiful, sad, scary as all Hell work of fiction.
