The Illusion of Living: a review (written by Kylie Wang)
Title: Bendy: The Illusion of Living
Author: Adrienne Kress
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Pages: 256
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? Read this snippet. If you like it, you might like the book. If you don’t, then maybe not.
“The only person I know who wants a truly honest opinion is me. Everyone else wants a truthful-sounding lie. They want the illusion. Ah, you knew I was going to write that now, didn’t you? Well I hope you did. Otherwise I would recommend starting this book over again.
A lie it was, of course, with a sprinkle of truth to make it palatable.”
Review courtesy of Kylie Wang.
What genre does Bendy and The Illusion of Living fall under? After flipping through the entire book, I was still fairly confused on that specific question. Let’s start with the basics, this book is fiction. It follows the life of Joey Drew, the successful creator of Joey Drew Studios. Even though the book was written to mimic a memoir with details such as footnotes and introductions about the author, it is nonetheless a fictional book with made-up characters. Yet the fact that these characters are not completely pulled from thin air, but based on the popular game “Bendy and The Ink Machine” made the mock memoir more interesting. Even if the characters are not based on real people, they are based on already existing concepts that the reader has some ideas on what it is about. This ties nicely to the entire philosophical idea Joey was trying to pass on to the readers, a thing doesn’t have to be existing to be real. Even if memoirs are supposed to be based on real-life beings and Joey was never alive, this book is still classified as a memoir because Joey lives in the heart of his readers, the fans of Bendy, Boris and Alice Angel. He is an illusion of living, an illusion of a real human being with a memoir.
I had never read a fake memoir before, but I would imagine that this book is a good example of one. The original author must have done a lot of research to give the illusion that the book was written in the 1920s, the sprinkling of details of rare events such as mentioning famous movie stars of the time Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the accurate description of prohibition and events that happened in that time period was added so subtly that it adds to the illusion that it was written 100 years ago. The language used in the book is elegant in a different way, it is quaint and extremely similar to The Great Gatsby, an actual book written in that time period. I actually enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby, especially Fitzgerald’s word choice and descriptions. I am glad that after a century, writers can still pull off the same style of writing.
I would recommend this book to many people. Any Bendy fans would enjoy the background of Joey Drew Studios, and see Joey as a sane man. However, I am sure that many Bendy fans would have already heard of the book, so let me recommend this book to some other people. Remember that saying “don’t judge a book by its cover?” Surprisingly, I am going to oppose that saying in this recommendation. I would recommend Bendy to anyone who likes to judge the book base off of the cover. I do not literally mean the cover of the book, but the concepts tied to the book that are not mentioned in text. The illusionary decorations surrounding the book, and the background that readers have to research themselves. When someone sees the cover of Bendy and the words “a Joey Drew memoir,” they are going to judge the cover. People will think of questions: how does this tie to the game? Isn’t the game famous? These people who ask questions love to ponder about connections, and this book includes many perspectives and connections that are hidden and only people who enjoy looking for them will find. So yes, I would recommend Bendy to anyone who likes to ponder more about the background of the book and think deeper than the words written straight onto the book.
