I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Docile by K.M. Szpara Published by Tor.com on March 3 2020
Genres: Adult, Dystopian, BDSM, LGBTQ+
Pages: 480
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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This review contains spoilers!
The nitty-gritty: Szpara tackles some big ideas in this edgy, sometimes shocking dystopian, but the lack of concrete world-building, uneven pacing and dubious character motivations left me a little cold.
I don’t usually do ranty reviews, but once in a while I read a book that simply demands one. Docile is one of those books for me, unfortunately, and while I’ve been really looking forward to this for months, it just didn’t work for me on several levels. There is a lot to unpack with this one, so do be warned that this review will be full of spoilers!
First, a quick story recap. Docile takes place in a future capitalist society where a huge divide has grown between the classes. At the top of the food chain are the trillionaires, those families and individuals worth the most. At the bottom of the heap is everyone else. Due to a law called Next of Kin laws, individuals stand to inherit their family’s debt, and those who marry are even worse off as they incur the debt of their spouses as well. This has caused many families to be millions of dollars in debt and unable to pay it back with the menial jobs available to them.
Luckily, a government entity called the Office of Debt Resolution (ODR) can help families erase their debt. In exchange for a specified length of time, family members can sell themselves out as “Dociles” to a trillionaire who is willing to pay off this debt for them. The catch? A Docile is little more than a slave, and often the length of servitude can stretch to ten years or more. Dociles are often bought as sex slaves for the enjoyment of trillionaires, and even worse, they are expected to agree to injections of a drug called Dociline which makes them agreeable to anything and more or less erases their personalities, sense of self and memories.
Elisha Wilder’s family is deep in debt, to the tune of three million dollars, when Elisha decides to leave home to become a Docile in order to save his family. His contract is bought by trillionaire Alex Bishop, whose family owns Bishop Laboratories, the entity responsible for inventing Dociline. Alex is feeling pressure from his family to buy a Docile for himself, and when he interviews Elisha, he knows he’ll be the perfect match for him, not only sexually, but as a vessel to test the new Dociline 3.0 formula. Unfortunately, Elisha refuses to take Dociline, and now Alex must readjust his plans.
A lot more happens in these almost five hundred pages, but I’ll stop here as I’m afraid this review is already going to be too long. You should know going in that Docile has been labeled as slavefic, BDSM, and noncon/dubcon by other reviewers, so do be cautious if any of these labels don’t work for you. There are quite a few very explicit sex scenes, and while we’re talking about trigger warnings, you can add rape, suicide attempt and drug use to the list.
I will start this review off with some positives, because I really enjoyed this book up until about the halfway point. Szpara is a solid writer and boy was that first half fast paced and addictive! The story alternates between Elisha and Alex, and that stylistic choice was a good one that kept the story moving. I also really enjoyed the moral implications of Elisha’s and Alex’s Docile/Owner relationship. There are some emotional moments between the two where they realize that this relationship isn’t healthy, and they both take steps to change it. This wasn’t something I was expecting, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Around the halfway point, however, the story abruptly turns into a courtroom drama, as Alex’s family decides to sue Elisha for conspiring against Alex. The pacing slows dramatically, and here is where Docile started to lose me. It’s also at this point where some of the characters’ actions just weren’t convincing. For example, I didn’t buy the fact that Alex suddenly feels really bad about Dociline and the part he’s played in its development and use over the years, especially since he’s so ruthless in the beginning. I didn’t care for all the family drama either. Both Elisha’s and Alex’s fathers are pretty awful people, and I found a lot of their dialog and reactions to be overly dramatic.
But the weakest part of this story for me was the world-building. There are so many inconsistencies with the world-building and I was left with so many questions, that I made a list of things that bothered me:
- Why trillionaires? That just seems so random and bizarre to me. Millionaires would make more sense, I guess. There is no solid explanation given about how so many people in one city came to be trillionaires.
- If the majority of the population is in debt and struggling to survive, why are people still going about their daily lives, sending their kids to college (to incur more debt!), shopping, etc.? But that’s OK, because all they need to do to get out of debt is to sell a family member as a Docile!
- The story is tightly focused in Baltimore, Maryland, but we never get a view of the wider world. Does this stuff just go on in Maryland?
- Why is everyone so obsessed with sex? I get that this is a BDSM story so, duh, it’s going to have sex. But seriously, the trillionaires are so horny, it was sort of ridiculous to me. And it’s not just the trillionaires having sex with their Dociles. Everyone has casual sex with each other all the time, like bunnies. And the parties! If orgies are a trigger warning for you, then I should add “orgies” to my list.
- The whole idea behind the dociline drug doesn’t make sense at all. So everyone is in debt and the only way to avoid debter’s prison is to sell yourself or a family member as a sex slave (basically that’s what Dociles are). But wait, the trillionaires don’t want anyone to suffer, so they’ve invented a drug that makes life easier on Dociles. It blocks the pain of being raped and physically abused and bonus, it messes with your memories so you don’t remember anything that happens to you as a Docile. And Dociles willingly let themselves be injected with Dociline over and over!
- Finally, near the end of the story, after Alex has a watershed moment about his involvement with Dociles, he decides to invent a counter-drug that will reverse the effects of Dociline, inspired by the fact that Elisha’s mother, ten years after her stint as a Docile, is still suffering from the drug. He grabs a couple of friends, finds a secret (non-sterile) location to develop and test his drug in, and within a couple of weeks, BOOM he has a successful drug! I mean come on. It’s going to take a year for scientists to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus!
Overall, Docile felt very uneven to me, and the thin world-building left me confused. I think Szpara’s themes and ideas are on the right track, but the execution needed some work. There are plenty of rave reviews out there, though, so perhaps I’m just not the right reader for this story.
Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy.
So I enjoyed your review but this is one I’m going to skip. I’ve been seeing it everywhere but really was never interested to begin with but this seals the deal. There are other things I can pick up instead.
Definitely, Barb. There are so many other good books out there.
Hmm, I still need to give this a read (I miss-shelved my ARC, thinking the release date was next month), but I suspect I’ll have a hard time hitting that courtroom lull as well. I wasn’t expecting that, but we’ll see if the rest is enough to carry me through.
Bob @ Beauty in Ruins recently posted…Book Review: Sixteenth Watch by Myke Cole
Really curious to hear your take on this Bob, especially since I feel like this topic is right up your alley!
I appreciate the review! I’ve seen a few raves so far, but your review makes me think I can skip this book.
If anything I’ve mentioned bothers you, definitely skip it!
Thanks for a very detailed, informative review: the premise for this story sounded interesting enough, but it was the “sex angle” (to simplify it) that made me decide for not requesting this book. Not out of any prudishness, but because I suspected that the premise might be just a thin cover for something else, and your comments on world-building and characterization confirmed my suspicions. Thanks for sharing!
Maddalena@Spaceandsorcery recently posted…THE EXPANSE – Season 4
I knew going in that this was going to have graphic sex scenes, but honestly at times it felt like the author was trying to come up with a good idea where he could include graphic sex that made sense, just because he wanted to titillate. For me all the horny characters just made me want to laugh! I doubt that’s what the author was going for:-)
Sorry this one didn’t work for you! I agree with some of your complaints (the miracle vaccine creation caused some major eye-rolling) and Alex’s epiphany could have been better handled. But I took the whole story as more of a….I don’t know that fable is the right word, but it’s a broad story for examining toxic relationships. So yes, some of it feels incredibly outlandish, but to me that was kind of the point.
Caitlin G. recently posted…Book Tag: International Women’s Day
I do agree, it was definitely a bold move to publish this book, especially with the graphic sex scenes, which you don’t always see in mainstream (OK now I’m calling Tor.com mainstream!) fiction. And I do see what the author was trying to do. But the negatives for me were so distracting that they took away from what he was trying to do.
Ditto Madalena. I have seen recently some very positive reviews for this and reading your review (which is excellent by the way) I couldn’t help thinking that maybe there’s a message in here somewhere but I’m struggling to think what that is – other than a very blunt way of saying that the masses get f**ked by the minority who have all the power? So maybe the drug is meant as something else, like we all get by day to day, and we’re sold the idea that our lives are good, meanwhile getting deeper into debt watching commercials that pedal consumerism – and the trillionaires – well, they’re filthy rich because they own and provoke our debt. That was of course all purely made up because I haven’t read the book. I tend to avoid dystopian books these days as I find the lack of world building a real issue that annoys the hell out of me.
Lynn 😀
Lynn Williams recently posted…Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson #12) by Patricia Briggs
There are lots of messages in this story, but honestly I was so distracted by the negatives that I had a hard time focusing on those messages, which is a shame. I know this is fiction and dystopian fiction at that, but it just wasn’t convincing enough for me to get behind the ideas. You have to convince people that this shit can actually happen!
Wow. And at 500 pages.
I think a good 100 pages could have been shaved off and it would have been much tighter.
What a bummer! This has been highly anticipated but it’s very clear it has its flaws. Hope your next read is better. 🙂
So many people love it, though. Maybe it’s just me?
I wasn’t really planning on reading this one, so I went ahead and read all the spoilery details. Holy crap, world-building sounds like a disaster. I would be pulling my hair out reading all those inconsistencies.
Yep, pretty sure this wouldn’t work for you at all!
Oh no, it’s so sad when a book you’ve been anticipating is such a huge let down and I had initially added this one to my tbr but I think I am going to take it off now :/ World building is a big part of the enjoyment for me, and if it is done poorly or with too many inconsistencies it is really going to bother me. And I also really hate when characters actions just don’t add up at all, so I think I would find this one too frustraing for me to enjoy.
Olivia Roach recently posted…Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [Book Review]
Sadly, it was very frustrating for me. But it works for lots of readers so you never know!
Yeah no. If I want BDSM in my books I’ll seek out erotica. I don’t mind a sex scene here and there but I dislike when its sold to me as something else. And the inconsistencies you mentioned would drive me bonkers. Thanks for saving me the trouble! Though I’m sorry you had to suffer. Lol
Your rant made me laugh LOL, I do so love a good rant now and then hahah. I have heard similar things about this one from a good friend who read it a while back. I confess that it only makes me more curious! The world building thing is an interesting note that I haven’t seen brought up before, so I’ll have to remember that when I get to it next month and read with awareness. Reading your review I can tell Kellan must have pulled some from his life (since he is from Baltimore and also works for the courts iirc). Sorry you didn’t enjoy this one after the halfway point!
I appreciate this review, Tammy. Sometimes you can’t tell enough from a book blurb to have a feel for whether or not it’s the sort of book you’ll enjoy. But from these longer reviews it can be much easier. In this case I’ll be skipping this book, but I think you did a great job trying to show both what you thought worked and what didn’t.
I was curious about this book and yer review has satisfied the need to read it. I like the concepts but not the execution. I did worry about that. All I have seen are the rave reviews so I am glad to have read yers. Thanks matey!
Oh gosh, sorry to hear this one didn’t really work for you. The premise of the book sounded interesting, but I think I’m going to pass since I trust your reviews and taste in books.