Books like Le miroir de Cassandre

"We didn't inherit the land from our ancestors, we have it on loan from our children."Or something like that.I admit, though I finished this book two months ago, it took me a while to review it. At first, I thought of it as an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque romp in the speculative fiction genre, one where the great ideas were hamstrung by the need of a plot. Little did I know, I had Thoughts on this book.Yeah. I'm a slow burner.So what is "Cassandra's Mirror", you ask? Well, it's about a girl who lost both her parents to a terrorist attack, who doesn't remember her childhood and who has the uncanny ability to predict terrorist attacks in modern-day Paris. Much like her Trojan counterpart, however, Cassandra Katzenberg has a hard time getting people to believe her (it doesn't help that she's something of a stuck-up little bitch). After the director of her boarding school tries to get sexual with her and she goes all Mike Tyson on his ass (no really) she goes off to become homeless, gather a following, and try to prevent her visions from coming true, all while trying to uncover the mystery of her past and understand the reason as to why she is the way she is.Now, out of that plot description, guess which part takes on the most of the book. Go on...I can wait...If you guessed the latter, great. If it sounds like a book you'd like, stop reading this review and go off to find a copy - if this is enough to interest you, you don't need to read any further.For those of you who are interested in my Thoughts, get comfortable, cause this is gonna be a long one."Cassandra's Mirror" is one of those metaphysical stories that is way more interested in subtext than the actual text. As such, the characters and overarching plot are pretty underdevelopped, to the point where none of the things that actually happen matter. Violence, sexual violence, murder and suicide are treated so breezily, the reader just takes them for granted and carries on. One might argue that, since the point of the story is different, that character and plot don't matter. However, as the actual point of the story is to raise Important Questions, I believe it would help if the reader could actually see the characters as human, and not convenient mouthpieces for Werber to use.See, "Cassandra's Mirror" talks a huge deal about the long-term consequences of our actions. Pollution, over-population, exhaustion of natural resources, all that lovely stuff. There's even a point in the book where our titular character dreams about being taken to court (in the year 3000) for the crimes of our own "selfish generation". ARE YOU GETTING THE SUBTEXT YET? ARE YOU? ARE YOU? SHALL I GET MY HAMMER OUT TO GET THE POINT ACROSS?Sarcasm aside, "Cassandra's Mirror" does actually carry some pretty solid ideas about people being too focused on immediate gratification and how hatred breeds hatred and how people are not what they seem to be. I especially liked the part where a disillusioned cop tells Cassandra how his terrorism-prevention unit got closed off because the ones in charge decided they were not worth the money, which I felt was realistically explained and a fairly organic as far as set-up went. However, no matter how tasty the ideas are, it doesn't change the fact that Werber gets them across in the laziest way possible - getting his characters to monologue about it, while barely twisting the story so that the overall conversation would make some contextual sense. I told you some details about the surface plot, but the truth is, I can barely remember how it resolved itself, or if resolved itself at all - I think it sort of fizzled out in the end, because the author ran out of deep subjects to talk about. The characters aren't very helpful either, even if they're given enough complicated backstory to fill a small house. Their deeper conflicts and relationships with one another are barely developped past the necessary in order for them to discuss the secrets of the universe, and that would have been well and dandy if Werber didn't want people to actually take something away from his book. Let me tell you - lecturing is not effective if the lecturer doesn't resound with his audience. And no, having them murder people on occasion does not make them any more of a cardboard cutout. Werber seems to think that, by simply doing something morally ambiguous (like sending a poisonous snake after the leader of a human trafficking ring) a character gains depth. Um, no. Since this review is already longer than I intended, I'll end on one final note, before my brain derails completely. Even if you disregard everything I've said about this book to date, even if those descriptions are exactly up your alley, there is no getting around the fact that this book is too much up its own arse to be taken seriously. The "science" used to explain Cassandra's ability to see the future is dubious at best and the way the book discusses autism makes me distinctly uncomfortable. Oftentimes, I had the feeling Werber couldn't decide himself what his book was - magical realism? speculative fiction? science fiction? - so he mashed together everything in the hope that the reader wouldn't notice.There is also the fact that he seems a little bit too smug about his own work, in a way that really ticks me off. In one of Cassandra's dream sequences, she is actually transported in a scene from a book she read, a book whose description matches one of Werber's own works, Le papillon des étoiles. Though Cassandra refers to the book in rather negative terms, this little self-insertion was a bit jarring, almost as much as the afterword of the book where Werber talks about a real-world event which matches the inciting incident of his own book, which took place as he put the final dot in the manuscript.I get it, okay, Bernie? I get it. You want to root your work in reality, even if its science fiction, so that the reader would take the themes close to their heart and learn important life lessons. That doesn't exempt you from making your plot and characters acessible to others.