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A review by dameofscones
The Forever Watch by David B. Ramirez
4.0
Read this and other reviews at:Ampersand Read Blog
The Forever Watch tears me in two a little. It has some nagging flaws. It has big parts that drag on and make it a little difficult to keep engaged. Its characters are hard to get to know, and the dialogue can be glaringly poor at times.
But there are books whose ending completely ruins the narrative. You're reading along, completely content, enjoying it even, and the ending stops so suddenly you're flipping pages to see where the rest of the story is, or characters die that you feel are completely unnecessary. For The Forever Watch, the exact opposite is true.
Not in that the whole first part of the book sucked. It was decent. The world of The Noah is set up wonderfully. There isn't a waffling of will-they won't-they get together between the main character and her male companion. I loved the idea of buying other people's memories as entertainment, like you would buy a Netflix subscription or watch a YouTube video. It's both a creepy concept and yet totally believable as a vice people in the future would develop.
But holes evolve. The dialogue can be patchy. Characters speak in a certain dialect (dropping the n's off words, for example), and then in a few pages have no distinguishing speech patterns - they suddenly sound like everyone else.
Those last hundred pages or so, though. They were spectacular. The way I mark a book as good, great, AMAAAZING, is when I think of it long after I finish it. If I feel deeply for the characters and care about their fate when the narrative ends, the author has done his or her job. And The Forever Watch ratchets up the action, the tension, the stakes for the characters in that homestretch. I am not ashamed to say that I cried at the end of this book. Crying (usually) means something has been done right - you're feeling something for a written work. I felt something for the characters, for their circumstances, their fate.
The Forever Watch tears me in two a little. It has some nagging flaws. It has big parts that drag on and make it a little difficult to keep engaged. Its characters are hard to get to know, and the dialogue can be glaringly poor at times.
But there are books whose ending completely ruins the narrative. You're reading along, completely content, enjoying it even, and the ending stops so suddenly you're flipping pages to see where the rest of the story is, or characters die that you feel are completely unnecessary. For The Forever Watch, the exact opposite is true.
Not in that the whole first part of the book sucked. It was decent. The world of The Noah is set up wonderfully. There isn't a waffling of will-they won't-they get together between the main character and her male companion. I loved the idea of buying other people's memories as entertainment, like you would buy a Netflix subscription or watch a YouTube video. It's both a creepy concept and yet totally believable as a vice people in the future would develop.
But holes evolve. The dialogue can be patchy. Characters speak in a certain dialect (dropping the n's off words, for example), and then in a few pages have no distinguishing speech patterns - they suddenly sound like everyone else.
Those last hundred pages or so, though. They were spectacular. The way I mark a book as good, great, AMAAAZING, is when I think of it long after I finish it. If I feel deeply for the characters and care about their fate when the narrative ends, the author has done his or her job. And The Forever Watch ratchets up the action, the tension, the stakes for the characters in that homestretch. I am not ashamed to say that I cried at the end of this book. Crying (usually) means something has been done right - you're feeling something for a written work. I felt something for the characters, for their circumstances, their fate.