The month's three reviews have been archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Hopefully, September gets me back on track for reading more...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Saturday, August 28, 2021
InterWorld (Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves)
InterWorld
The Inter World series, Book 1
Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: High school sophomore Joey Harker is what you might call "directionally challenged"; he's gotten lost in his own home more than once, and asking him to navigate downtown Greenville would be like asking him to plot a course through the heart of the Amazon. So when his social studies teacher - notorious for his unconventional teaching methods - decides to test his class by dropping them off at random places around town to find their way back (without cell phones or other cheats), it's inevitable that Joey would get separated from his two teammates... only he outdoes himself this time. Not only does he get lost in Greenville, he gets lost in the wrong Greenville; somehow, he slips across the border between worlds and winds up in an alternate version of Earth, one where the cars are weird colors, the Golden Arches are tartan green, and where Mom and Dad had a girl Josephine instead of Joey.
Then his day gets even weirder... and even worse.
Before he knows it, he's facing a stranger with a mirror for a face, cybernetic attackers on hovering disks, and a mind-controlling witch with two inhuman minions. Joey learns that he is a Walker, capable of moving between the near-countless alternate Earths, and that he has just become a potentially powerful prize in an ongoing power struggle between the magical HEX and the technological Binary empires, who seek to impose their rule across all worlds of the Altiverse. His only hope for freedom lies with the InterWorld, a small guerrilla force of operatives that struggles to preserve freedom and balance between magic and science... a force composed of sometimes wildly-divergent alternate versions of himself, all different genders and ages and borderline different species. But Joey's disastrous first Walk makes him some powerful enemies and few friends, even among the InterWorld agents. How can he save the Altiverse when he might not even be able to save himself?
REVIEW: This looked like a quick, somewhat lightweight read (or listen, rather, as it was an audiobook loan from the local library though Overdrive), which is about where my mind seems to be lately. I find Gaiman a bit hit-and-miss, but the concept looked interesting, and - again - I was looking for something quick and not hugely demanding. On that level, Interworld delivers. Beyond that... not so much.
Joey is one of those main characters who is special because the audience is told he's special. We in the audience are shown that he can Walk between worlds, an understandably rare gift... one that, apparently, only iterations of Joey can accomplish. But I never really experienced his specialness, aside from everyone from his enemies to his other selves insisting that he's some sort of prodigy. He stumbles, he bumbles, he gets on everyone's bad side for mistakes and misunderstandings and just being the main character in a story that requires him to be mistaken and misunderstood, he wavers between insecure outsider to spouter of glib comebacks, he ticks all the boxes in the boilerplate "underdog teen protagonist who must prove himself to everyone, including himself" checklist, but I honestly never felt the potential everyone saw in him, particularly the iteration of him that I had to follow around the tale. The baddies are cruel and overpowered, but are ultimately cardboard caricatures who ooze in and out of scenes, dripping condescension and spouting monologues (and revealing major parts of their Evil Plans in front of their opponent), seeming to exist merely to torment Joey. Descriptions start feeling repetitive and drawn out, not helped by an issue with the audiobook version: one of the "keys" to finding InterWorld is a series of very annoying electronic beeps and blurps and buzzes - a sort of mnemonic device to help a Walker home in on the hidden base - that sounded like some major error from my cell phone... and which the audiobook insists on using, repeatedly and without warning, throughout the story. I came close to clipping a half-star off the rating for auditory annoyance alone.
There are some good ideas and images, plenty of action sequences (even if several hinge on Joey's luck, good or bad, getting him into or out of trouble), and lots of potential in the setup. A few bits come close to living up to that potential. The rest, unfortunately, fell flat for me. As I've said before (too many times), I've read worse, but even for a lightweight timekiller of a story, I admit I'd hoped for a little better.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dark Matter (Blake Crouch) - My Review
The Lives of Christopher Chant (Diana Wynne Jones) - My Review
A Darker Shade of Magic (V. E. Schwab) - My Review
The Inter World series, Book 1
Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: High school sophomore Joey Harker is what you might call "directionally challenged"; he's gotten lost in his own home more than once, and asking him to navigate downtown Greenville would be like asking him to plot a course through the heart of the Amazon. So when his social studies teacher - notorious for his unconventional teaching methods - decides to test his class by dropping them off at random places around town to find their way back (without cell phones or other cheats), it's inevitable that Joey would get separated from his two teammates... only he outdoes himself this time. Not only does he get lost in Greenville, he gets lost in the wrong Greenville; somehow, he slips across the border between worlds and winds up in an alternate version of Earth, one where the cars are weird colors, the Golden Arches are tartan green, and where Mom and Dad had a girl Josephine instead of Joey.
Then his day gets even weirder... and even worse.
Before he knows it, he's facing a stranger with a mirror for a face, cybernetic attackers on hovering disks, and a mind-controlling witch with two inhuman minions. Joey learns that he is a Walker, capable of moving between the near-countless alternate Earths, and that he has just become a potentially powerful prize in an ongoing power struggle between the magical HEX and the technological Binary empires, who seek to impose their rule across all worlds of the Altiverse. His only hope for freedom lies with the InterWorld, a small guerrilla force of operatives that struggles to preserve freedom and balance between magic and science... a force composed of sometimes wildly-divergent alternate versions of himself, all different genders and ages and borderline different species. But Joey's disastrous first Walk makes him some powerful enemies and few friends, even among the InterWorld agents. How can he save the Altiverse when he might not even be able to save himself?
REVIEW: This looked like a quick, somewhat lightweight read (or listen, rather, as it was an audiobook loan from the local library though Overdrive), which is about where my mind seems to be lately. I find Gaiman a bit hit-and-miss, but the concept looked interesting, and - again - I was looking for something quick and not hugely demanding. On that level, Interworld delivers. Beyond that... not so much.
Joey is one of those main characters who is special because the audience is told he's special. We in the audience are shown that he can Walk between worlds, an understandably rare gift... one that, apparently, only iterations of Joey can accomplish. But I never really experienced his specialness, aside from everyone from his enemies to his other selves insisting that he's some sort of prodigy. He stumbles, he bumbles, he gets on everyone's bad side for mistakes and misunderstandings and just being the main character in a story that requires him to be mistaken and misunderstood, he wavers between insecure outsider to spouter of glib comebacks, he ticks all the boxes in the boilerplate "underdog teen protagonist who must prove himself to everyone, including himself" checklist, but I honestly never felt the potential everyone saw in him, particularly the iteration of him that I had to follow around the tale. The baddies are cruel and overpowered, but are ultimately cardboard caricatures who ooze in and out of scenes, dripping condescension and spouting monologues (and revealing major parts of their Evil Plans in front of their opponent), seeming to exist merely to torment Joey. Descriptions start feeling repetitive and drawn out, not helped by an issue with the audiobook version: one of the "keys" to finding InterWorld is a series of very annoying electronic beeps and blurps and buzzes - a sort of mnemonic device to help a Walker home in on the hidden base - that sounded like some major error from my cell phone... and which the audiobook insists on using, repeatedly and without warning, throughout the story. I came close to clipping a half-star off the rating for auditory annoyance alone.
There are some good ideas and images, plenty of action sequences (even if several hinge on Joey's luck, good or bad, getting him into or out of trouble), and lots of potential in the setup. A few bits come close to living up to that potential. The rest, unfortunately, fell flat for me. As I've said before (too many times), I've read worse, but even for a lightweight timekiller of a story, I admit I'd hoped for a little better.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dark Matter (Blake Crouch) - My Review
The Lives of Christopher Chant (Diana Wynne Jones) - My Review
A Darker Shade of Magic (V. E. Schwab) - My Review
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
The Good Luck Girls (Charlotte Nicole Davis)
The Good Luck Girls
The Good Luck Girls series, Book 1
Charlotte Nicole Davis
Tor Teen
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Western
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When the Empire that conquered Arketta fell, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era of equality and opportunity. Instead, it was more of the same oppression and prejudice, especially for the dustbloods: descendants of criminals and indentured servants sent by the empire to subdue the native cultures and tame the new land, only to end up little more than property to the fairblood aristocracy and, more recently, the fairblood landowners. Dustbloods are told to be grateful for the meager opportunities to repay their debts - after all, everyone knows it's just their nature to be lazy criminals, and fairbloods are doing them a favor teaching them the value of hard work. The only way out is to strike it rich - essentially impossible for a dustblood - or escape Arketta's borders - almost as impossible. But that doesn't stop the desperate from trying...
Aster and Clementine were sold by their dustblood parents when they were young. Agents for the "welcome houses" promised the girls would have shelter and fine clothes and food every night, in exchange for providing certain services to paying customers. As with most fairblood promises, it's a lie; the "good luck" girls are marked with indelible "favor" tattoos of cursed ink that burn white-hot if concealed, sent to the doctor for cutting to prevent pregnancy, and worked mercilessly as servants until their sixteenth birthday when they start their real work in the private rooms... work helped by addictive sweet thistle that keeps them docile and eventually rots their minds away. Aster "graduated" a year ago, and will do anything to keep her sister from becoming another plaything for the brags, the clients who frequent the welcome houses and have been known to kill girls as casually as drowning kittens... but there's nothing she can do, not when their lack of shadows mark them as dustbloods and their favors forever mark them as runaways. But Clementine's first night with a brag ends in murder - self defense, as the man was choking her to death, but the fairblood law won't see it that way. Now, the girls have no choice but to flee, following a slender thread of hope found in old tales of "Lady Ghost", who is said to be able to strip away favor marks and help good luck girls find freedom. With three companions - Clementine's friends Tansy and Mallow and the unlikely ally Violet, a rare fairblood good luck girl - Aster and Clementine make a desperate bid for freedom... but the law isn't the only danger awaiting them, in a rough country where wild beasts and vengeful spirits are as deadly as any lawman's bullet.
REVIEW: Once again, I wanted to like this book. It starts with a decent, if dark, premise and world, adding a strong Western frontier spice with a twist of ghostly menace. The girls have distinctive personalities, and if they aren't always deep, they do end up cohesing into an okay ensemble for the adventure. There's also a fair bit of action, so the tale doesn't drag too often (even if it does sometimes repeat itself). But at some point, little issues start accumulating into big irritants. The dustblood/fairblood dynamic is clearly meant as a stand-in for cultural and racial prejudices that see some people utterly dehumanized (while the dominant culture/race demands gratitude for not treating them even worse), but for some reason I started feeling like it was being a little too obvious about the substitution, the hammered-home disparities between dustbloods and fairbloods turning them both into something approaching caricatures rather than characters. Likewise, most every man in the book (with one notable exception) is a misogynistic creep/borderline (or actual) rapist who cannot understand why the heroines don't simply accept and appreciate their single role in Arkettan society. This, too, soon ventures past a harrowing portrayal of how women are treated in a misogynistic society and becomes almost cartoonish in its extremity and repetition (not at all helped by how the narrator of this audiobook spoke the male lines with a sleazy, slinky, almost cackling drawl). There's also a noted habit of every character in the book to pick terrible, terrible times and places for long, heartfelt conversations... and a habit of the author repeating failures to drive home just how terrible the situation is, how horribly the girls are being treated, how hopeless and cruel and infuriatingly unfair the society they live in is, and so forth.
The parts that ultimately sank it below a flat Okay rating, though, come toward the climax, when the torture and objectification is drug out far, far too long, banging the same plot notes again and again and yet again like a sledgehammer dropped on a keyboard, to make subsequent events remotely plausible; I'm avoiding details because of spoilers, but at some point it completely killed my lingering suspension of disbelief stone-cold dead, leaving me to trail along behind the story to the conclusion without the slightest bit of concern or engagement in what was happening to whom. Killing my suspension of disbelief - one the main driving factors behind why I read in the first place - is one of the major sins in my list of reading commandments. While there are some nice and interesting elements here, and several places where the story does come together to work decently, I just could not get past that sin, which taints everything that came before.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Walk the Earth a Stranger (Rae Carson) - My Review
The Misadventures of Maude March (Audrey Couloumbis) - My Review
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
The Good Luck Girls series, Book 1
Charlotte Nicole Davis
Tor Teen
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Western
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When the Empire that conquered Arketta fell, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era of equality and opportunity. Instead, it was more of the same oppression and prejudice, especially for the dustbloods: descendants of criminals and indentured servants sent by the empire to subdue the native cultures and tame the new land, only to end up little more than property to the fairblood aristocracy and, more recently, the fairblood landowners. Dustbloods are told to be grateful for the meager opportunities to repay their debts - after all, everyone knows it's just their nature to be lazy criminals, and fairbloods are doing them a favor teaching them the value of hard work. The only way out is to strike it rich - essentially impossible for a dustblood - or escape Arketta's borders - almost as impossible. But that doesn't stop the desperate from trying...
Aster and Clementine were sold by their dustblood parents when they were young. Agents for the "welcome houses" promised the girls would have shelter and fine clothes and food every night, in exchange for providing certain services to paying customers. As with most fairblood promises, it's a lie; the "good luck" girls are marked with indelible "favor" tattoos of cursed ink that burn white-hot if concealed, sent to the doctor for cutting to prevent pregnancy, and worked mercilessly as servants until their sixteenth birthday when they start their real work in the private rooms... work helped by addictive sweet thistle that keeps them docile and eventually rots their minds away. Aster "graduated" a year ago, and will do anything to keep her sister from becoming another plaything for the brags, the clients who frequent the welcome houses and have been known to kill girls as casually as drowning kittens... but there's nothing she can do, not when their lack of shadows mark them as dustbloods and their favors forever mark them as runaways. But Clementine's first night with a brag ends in murder - self defense, as the man was choking her to death, but the fairblood law won't see it that way. Now, the girls have no choice but to flee, following a slender thread of hope found in old tales of "Lady Ghost", who is said to be able to strip away favor marks and help good luck girls find freedom. With three companions - Clementine's friends Tansy and Mallow and the unlikely ally Violet, a rare fairblood good luck girl - Aster and Clementine make a desperate bid for freedom... but the law isn't the only danger awaiting them, in a rough country where wild beasts and vengeful spirits are as deadly as any lawman's bullet.
REVIEW: Once again, I wanted to like this book. It starts with a decent, if dark, premise and world, adding a strong Western frontier spice with a twist of ghostly menace. The girls have distinctive personalities, and if they aren't always deep, they do end up cohesing into an okay ensemble for the adventure. There's also a fair bit of action, so the tale doesn't drag too often (even if it does sometimes repeat itself). But at some point, little issues start accumulating into big irritants. The dustblood/fairblood dynamic is clearly meant as a stand-in for cultural and racial prejudices that see some people utterly dehumanized (while the dominant culture/race demands gratitude for not treating them even worse), but for some reason I started feeling like it was being a little too obvious about the substitution, the hammered-home disparities between dustbloods and fairbloods turning them both into something approaching caricatures rather than characters. Likewise, most every man in the book (with one notable exception) is a misogynistic creep/borderline (or actual) rapist who cannot understand why the heroines don't simply accept and appreciate their single role in Arkettan society. This, too, soon ventures past a harrowing portrayal of how women are treated in a misogynistic society and becomes almost cartoonish in its extremity and repetition (not at all helped by how the narrator of this audiobook spoke the male lines with a sleazy, slinky, almost cackling drawl). There's also a noted habit of every character in the book to pick terrible, terrible times and places for long, heartfelt conversations... and a habit of the author repeating failures to drive home just how terrible the situation is, how horribly the girls are being treated, how hopeless and cruel and infuriatingly unfair the society they live in is, and so forth.
The parts that ultimately sank it below a flat Okay rating, though, come toward the climax, when the torture and objectification is drug out far, far too long, banging the same plot notes again and again and yet again like a sledgehammer dropped on a keyboard, to make subsequent events remotely plausible; I'm avoiding details because of spoilers, but at some point it completely killed my lingering suspension of disbelief stone-cold dead, leaving me to trail along behind the story to the conclusion without the slightest bit of concern or engagement in what was happening to whom. Killing my suspension of disbelief - one the main driving factors behind why I read in the first place - is one of the major sins in my list of reading commandments. While there are some nice and interesting elements here, and several places where the story does come together to work decently, I just could not get past that sin, which taints everything that came before.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Walk the Earth a Stranger (Rae Carson) - My Review
The Misadventures of Maude March (Audrey Couloumbis) - My Review
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Deal with the Devil (Kit Rocha)
Deal with the Devil
The Mercenary Librarians series, Book 1
Kit Rocha
Tor
Fiction, Action/Romance/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: After the solar flares that devastated global civilization, nations crumbled into hardscrabble remnants of themselves. Too many city and state governments found themselves at the mercy of the TechCorps, elite private organizations who rule with iron fists and artificially enhanced soldiers. For the average citizen, life is cruel and hard and continues only at the whim of forces beyond their control... but some few manage to slip the leashes of their masters and go underground, quietly working against the TechCorps and the criminal networks that spread to fill the power vacuum across America.
Nina was once one of three clone siblings, trained as a unit for special ops, until one disastrous mission left her the last one standing. Faking her death, she fled to a nondescript neighborhood in Atlanta, where she and two friends work to create something like stability and hope and community. Together, they help the people by distributing books and media beyond the strictly controlled (and profit-driven) official TechCorps outlets, providing shelter and medicine, even helping locals preserve food from their meager farms and gardens (most of which are illegal for not using patented TechCorps crops and seeds). When Nina gets word that a stash from the Rogue Library of Congress - a group of renegade librarians who, during the collapse of the old world, defied orders and compiled everything they could in hidden and sealed vaults for future generations - she knows it could mark a real turning point, the chance to bring so much lost knowledge back to the people and maybe break the chains binding the world. She also knows that it may well be too good to be true, but she cannot resist the hope... or the handsome messenger.
Knox was captain of the Silver Devils, a unit of artificially enhanced Protectorate soldiers crafted and mercilessly trained to enforce TechCorps rule, until his masters pushed too hard and stole too much. Now he and his men are on the run - but they can't run forever. They'll die in a matter of weeks if they can't figure out how to disable the killswitch in their enhancements, a built-in failsafe against disobedience. His team found a promising lead in a rogue specialist, but she was kidnapped, and the abductors demand a ransom: the capture and return of Nina. What at first seemed like a simple, if cold-blooded, equation - a stranger exchanged for a friend and the future of his men - soon becomes far too complicated. Knox has never met anyone like Nina before, never felt anything like she makes him feel. Can he really betray this woman and her friends? Does he even have a choice?
REVIEW: This book makes its promises pretty early on and up front, offering a dystopian post-apocalyptic world as backdrop for a decently steamy romance, with a healthy dose of action and angst and banter among side characters. Nina, Knox, and most of the characters in the book have suitably traumatic backstories that render them physically superior but emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of True Love, thrust into a plot that ensures betrayal and heartbreak and second-guessing of one's own heart (and a few opportunities for sex even while they wrestle with their inner angst over whether they're even capable of love). They have distinctive personalities and mesh well together, even when they have personality clashes. It also contains a decent level of actual action, not just the promise of action; these are all mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic world, and their travels are suitably and inherently dangerous. (Some stories set up "dangerous" worlds and neglect the actual dangerous part.) So, on those levels, the story more or less works.
The "less" parts, unfortunately, really started to bug me.
More than once, the characters - all ostensibly tactically trained - stumble into traps so obvious they might as well have been red X's under cartoon boxes propped on sticks. (Seriously, when I - someone about as tactically aware as a clod of dirt - spot a trap before the military "expert" characters, something's wrong.) There were also far, far too many times where someone was on the verge of saying something exceptionally important, only for another character to barge in right as they were opening their mouth and stop the conversation before it starts. A few times, yes, understandable, but it just kept happening. I especially got irked how the same characters would've had ample time to talk if they hadn't wasted so much time before opening their mouth wrestling with the same angst-riddled Issues they'd already wrestled with before. Another trick that started out interesting but soon felt like so much wasted time was the author's insistence on interlude notes and memos from the outfits that created Nina, Knox, and the other characters, which didn't ultimately add much that the story itself didn't tell me and just became clutter. Add in a few twists that felt rather cliche and stale and an ending that, given the high level of action and violence preceding it, felt weirdly flat and rushed (followed by an eyeroll-worthy "twist" setting up a conflict for the next installment), and I wound up feeling distinctly unengaged.
There are many parts here that work well, and should've elevated it to a Good rating, but it just starts feeling too stretched and over the top.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Three Mages and a Margarita (Annette Marie) - My Review
Bitter Seeds (Ian Tregillis) - My Review
The Mercenary Librarians series, Book 1
Kit Rocha
Tor
Fiction, Action/Romance/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: After the solar flares that devastated global civilization, nations crumbled into hardscrabble remnants of themselves. Too many city and state governments found themselves at the mercy of the TechCorps, elite private organizations who rule with iron fists and artificially enhanced soldiers. For the average citizen, life is cruel and hard and continues only at the whim of forces beyond their control... but some few manage to slip the leashes of their masters and go underground, quietly working against the TechCorps and the criminal networks that spread to fill the power vacuum across America.
Nina was once one of three clone siblings, trained as a unit for special ops, until one disastrous mission left her the last one standing. Faking her death, she fled to a nondescript neighborhood in Atlanta, where she and two friends work to create something like stability and hope and community. Together, they help the people by distributing books and media beyond the strictly controlled (and profit-driven) official TechCorps outlets, providing shelter and medicine, even helping locals preserve food from their meager farms and gardens (most of which are illegal for not using patented TechCorps crops and seeds). When Nina gets word that a stash from the Rogue Library of Congress - a group of renegade librarians who, during the collapse of the old world, defied orders and compiled everything they could in hidden and sealed vaults for future generations - she knows it could mark a real turning point, the chance to bring so much lost knowledge back to the people and maybe break the chains binding the world. She also knows that it may well be too good to be true, but she cannot resist the hope... or the handsome messenger.
Knox was captain of the Silver Devils, a unit of artificially enhanced Protectorate soldiers crafted and mercilessly trained to enforce TechCorps rule, until his masters pushed too hard and stole too much. Now he and his men are on the run - but they can't run forever. They'll die in a matter of weeks if they can't figure out how to disable the killswitch in their enhancements, a built-in failsafe against disobedience. His team found a promising lead in a rogue specialist, but she was kidnapped, and the abductors demand a ransom: the capture and return of Nina. What at first seemed like a simple, if cold-blooded, equation - a stranger exchanged for a friend and the future of his men - soon becomes far too complicated. Knox has never met anyone like Nina before, never felt anything like she makes him feel. Can he really betray this woman and her friends? Does he even have a choice?
REVIEW: This book makes its promises pretty early on and up front, offering a dystopian post-apocalyptic world as backdrop for a decently steamy romance, with a healthy dose of action and angst and banter among side characters. Nina, Knox, and most of the characters in the book have suitably traumatic backstories that render them physically superior but emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of True Love, thrust into a plot that ensures betrayal and heartbreak and second-guessing of one's own heart (and a few opportunities for sex even while they wrestle with their inner angst over whether they're even capable of love). They have distinctive personalities and mesh well together, even when they have personality clashes. It also contains a decent level of actual action, not just the promise of action; these are all mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic world, and their travels are suitably and inherently dangerous. (Some stories set up "dangerous" worlds and neglect the actual dangerous part.) So, on those levels, the story more or less works.
The "less" parts, unfortunately, really started to bug me.
More than once, the characters - all ostensibly tactically trained - stumble into traps so obvious they might as well have been red X's under cartoon boxes propped on sticks. (Seriously, when I - someone about as tactically aware as a clod of dirt - spot a trap before the military "expert" characters, something's wrong.) There were also far, far too many times where someone was on the verge of saying something exceptionally important, only for another character to barge in right as they were opening their mouth and stop the conversation before it starts. A few times, yes, understandable, but it just kept happening. I especially got irked how the same characters would've had ample time to talk if they hadn't wasted so much time before opening their mouth wrestling with the same angst-riddled Issues they'd already wrestled with before. Another trick that started out interesting but soon felt like so much wasted time was the author's insistence on interlude notes and memos from the outfits that created Nina, Knox, and the other characters, which didn't ultimately add much that the story itself didn't tell me and just became clutter. Add in a few twists that felt rather cliche and stale and an ending that, given the high level of action and violence preceding it, felt weirdly flat and rushed (followed by an eyeroll-worthy "twist" setting up a conflict for the next installment), and I wound up feeling distinctly unengaged.
There are many parts here that work well, and should've elevated it to a Good rating, but it just starts feeling too stretched and over the top.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Three Mages and a Margarita (Annette Marie) - My Review
Bitter Seeds (Ian Tregillis) - My Review
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