A review by snowbenton
Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas

3.0

This book has a lot of potential, but really needed an editor. The pacing of the story felt off; there wasn't a consistent ebb and flow, it was either drawn-out tension or cutesy interactions. It didn't help that the story was so closely focused on our four characters that there was no chapter-to-chapter tension: it just felt like one ongoing scene. Same for the writing itself; the sentences had a tendency to have the same length and rhythm so it was hard to read more than a chapter or two at a time.

The lack of world-building also made it less fun. Multiple times Sagas described voices as unaccented, which kept yanking me out of the story. This is set in the far future where humans are living all over space. There is not any such thing as unaccented now and certainly not then. Sagas should have used the language and accent to help me learn more about the world. We got such a nebulous view of the world and it feels like Sagas just didn't care enough to plan out the details.

It's a very funny book and that's what kept me going. I love a found family story, and it had a lot of heart.