A review by jojobee03
The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card

1.0

I finished it. That's the best I can say for this book. The first one had some problems, but the idea of the mages and the old gods was interesting enough to go ahead and read the second book.. unfortunately the problems in the first book are just amplified in the second book.

The characters only exist to be plot tools, and it's obvious. There are no unique voices in this novel, everyone just sounds the same. The dialogue is weird- I don't know any teenagers who talk the way he wrote them to. But I could bear the strange dialogue choices and the protagonist being annoyingly perfect until the author took a sharp turn into "all teen girls are sluts who want to have a god's babies" territory. Not even just being horny teenagers, but specifically to be impregnated. It's ridiculous. Who is this book even for?

The weird turn into babymaking land was accompanied by Card weaving his religious ideas into the text as well. We get it, you're a Mormon (and it's plain in most of his books) but the heavy-handedness of this one was hard to overlook.

I'm any case, I will only read the final book for the purposes of hate-reading, at this point.