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A review by kentcryptid
Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks
3.0
I love the setting of this book: a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland populated by ancient cyborgs, intelligent machines, enclosed residents of buried sanctuary cities and desperate survivors scraping a living by scavenging machine parts among the sands.
There are, if I counted correctly, eight POV characters including a rebellious young woman who's grown up crossing and re-crossing the desert with her doctor sister, a warlike artificial intelligence, the cyborg leader of a refugee colony and a trader's daughter who's more savvy than she first appears. This multiplicity of POVs, coupled with the extremely short chapters, is a problem because you repeatedly spend three pages in someone's head, then hurtle off into someone else's. This means that you never really get to know any of the characters well and so emotional moments towards the end of the book feel unearned.
There's also a frustrating amount of characters not telling each other much-needed pieces of information, dialogue that mostly feels like nothing a real person would ever say, and exposition delivered by POV characters thinking in detail about events that have happened 'off-screen.'
I still loved the setting by the end, I just wish the author could have done more with it.
There are, if I counted correctly, eight POV characters including a rebellious young woman who's grown up crossing and re-crossing the desert with her doctor sister, a warlike artificial intelligence, the cyborg leader of a refugee colony and a trader's daughter who's more savvy than she first appears. This multiplicity of POVs, coupled with the extremely short chapters, is a problem because you repeatedly spend three pages in someone's head, then hurtle off into someone else's. This means that you never really get to know any of the characters well and so emotional moments towards the end of the book feel unearned.
There's also a frustrating amount of characters not telling each other much-needed pieces of information, dialogue that mostly feels like nothing a real person would ever say, and exposition delivered by POV characters thinking in detail about events that have happened 'off-screen.'
I still loved the setting by the end, I just wish the author could have done more with it.