I enjoyed A Perfect Harvest, but I didn’t think it was quite as good as Heart Seizure, the first in this tetralogy.
It’s a good set-up: Miguel has a terminal diagnosis and decides that he wants to die by allowing a harvest of all his transplantable organs to allow others to live. This kicks off a colossal legal debate, plus all the usual irrational nonsense on social media...and the making of Miguel’s story into a musical.
Bill Fitzhugh is very good at satirizing all these things and he does it well here, with a good deal of wit and a very sharp eye for the hypocrisies and ethical evasiveness which surround the issue. I did, however have a problem with the narrative voice, that of a character whose involvement in the story doesn’t become clear for quite a while and which didn’t quite ring true to me. He addresses the reader directly quite often which can be effective, but this time I found it intrusive rather than adding to the story. The songs for the musical, while suitably tasteless, weren’t really quite as funny as they might have been, and some of the banter between Miguel and his friends didn’t work for me (although some of it was genuinely funny, to be fair).
I certainly wanted to read to the end of the book and there was enough here to round a 3.5-star rating up to 4, but I can’t recommend it unreservedly.
(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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