The Blueprint is one of those books that was emotional and difficult to listen to at some times. While this is set in the future, the rhetoric of toxic relationships, grooming, and the slavery and racism brought chills to my bones. I had to step away from the audiobook a few days just to stop the simmering rage and heavy emotions. Keep reading this book review for my full thoughts.
Summary
Solenne Bonet lives in Texas, where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman’s occupation, spouse, and residence. She finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who’d been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana. But history repeats itself when Solenne, lonely and naïve, finds herself entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
The Blueprint is a book which straddles the line between the future, the past, and the present. With Henrietta’s story set in the 1800s, there’s a distinct sense of the past. However it’s also in the way the racist and sexist rhetoric has evolved and developed in the legislature and culture. In many things it echoes current statements and rhetoric you hear in debates, in the ways women’s rights are stripped from them if they ever had them at all. And a feeling of the future in the technology and the ways it can be adapted and used to subjugate already marginalized people.
In this straddling of the times, it feels harrowing like an echo of the past and a warning of the future. The technology we could have in the future and the way it could be adapted for future oppression. Listening to Joniece Abbott-Pratt was an emotional and difficult experience. Abbott-Pratt brings Solenne’s pain, her love, her dashed hopes to life. It feels like a conversation and further humanizes this twisted manipulation of grooming and toxic relationships. The ways love, survival, and exploitation are intertwined.
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The Blueprint is an emotional and impactful book. It questions how we can end these cycles of abuse, ownership, and toxicity. It doesn’t hand you easy answers about the way forward, about our lives as individuals and in this system. But it’s a book I’ll be thinking about for a while. Find The Blueprint on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, Libro.fm, and Google Play.