The High-Rise Diver hooked me in from the very beginning!

Hitomi is a psychiatrist assigned to help Riva, a high-rise diver who has suddenly given up diving and shows very little motivation to even live. Despite her best efforts, Hitomi struggles to figure out what went wrong with Riva and how to ultimately help her want to dive again. But Hitomi needs to show results soon, failure is not an option - or else both her and Riva will pay the price.

This book was fascinating. It is based in a world where everything you do is closely monitored, and your success and contribution to society are everything. I could truly feel the stress and pressure Hitomi was under, and could not wait to see how things would turn out. However, I wish we were given a little more incite into Riva and what she was inwardly going through. But overall, this book was very interesting read!

This dystopian novel was so believable that every part of their lives seemed to be believable. Although I didn't really warm to the characters, perhaps this was intentional. The novel was still enjoyable in spite of this.

I thought the author did an excellent job of showing just how far we are willing to go to save ourselves, and how desperate we can become to avoid adversity. This was a story that really made me think about what it is to protect ourselves, and how far we can be pushed before we rebel.

A dystopian society where privacy is not an option. All eyes are on you everywhere and all the time. Your achievements determine your way of life and who you will become. Hitomi, a psychologist, is assigned to find out the reasoning of Riva's departure from her athletic career as a high-rise diver. All eyes are on Riva as her posture, demeanor, and speech change. Hitomi can't seem to figure her out. With a boss breathing down her neck and investors wanting answers Hitomi must make sacrifices and choices that could put her own life on a dangerous trajectory.

After finishing this novel I really wished there was more to the story. I didn't quite understand what was the point of Riva. I thought she would play a much bigger role later on to the plot of the story or even to
Hitmomi herself but that didn't happen. I felt really dissatisfied with the ending and I don't really know if Hitomi even learned a lesson through this whole ordeal. Maybe it was the translation but it just fell flat.

Kindly received an ARC from World Editions and Net Galley. Thank you.

This is aa elegant and harrowing story of a dystopian world in which career success is all--quite literally--and in which quitting a job, dealing with burnout, or wanting a different life than what has been prescribed for you is unthinkable. Your job performance determines where you live, who you can date, what you eat, and more. This sounds like it's heavy-handed, but it never is: Lucadou deftly creates a world with delicate strands of information and description, weaving a complex, shimmering picture of a terrifying world.

I think this was a well written book and a really good translation. There were obvious similarities to Brave New World but it was different enough to tell an accompanying story about the pursuit of perfection.

The that gets me about this book, now that I've finished it, is the fact that it was never about the High Rise Diver at all.
I think I had been focusing on Riva, looking for how her story would play out, thinking she was the protagonist but she wasn't. It was Hitomi who was the protagonist and her observation of Riva was more so about her own story. It was about how she responded to Riva, how she reacted to her job and her own personal history in relation to Riva's that was the point of the novel. Atleast, I think so.
Riva was a strange character. There were no revelations from her directly. We hardly ever get to see what she really thinks and feels, her whole life is simply shown as everyone else's perception of her and that must amount to a great deal of distortion.

Maybe something was lost in translation, but I did not enjoy this. The lack of paragraphs, quotations, etc. made it confusing and difficult to follow.

Kindly received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.