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dark
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book makes me furious. I have so much I want to say but I’ll try and keep it compact.
Pros:
-The first part is KILLER. I was so HYPED after reading part one. The two female characters are so unhinged and vivid and singular in their characterization, I loved them instantly.
-Fun sci-fi nonsense is present.
-Numerous smart concepts all well presented and exaggerated to a believable sci-fi degree.
-The aliens are properly alien in the way they speak and act.
-Excellent writing. This author is clearly extremely talented.
-It’s funny as hell, I really appreciated the humor. It reminded me favorable of John Scalzi in that way.
-It’s slow paced but usually for good reason. The text is dense with scientific stuff but the dialog is snappy. Usually.
Cons:
-This book pulls a bait and switch. The rest of the book is nothing like part one. Part two switches to a new character and I’m like “that’s fine, gotta add the straight man”. When we got another POV, and another, until...
-This became a military thriller! That’s what this book really is. I was furious.
-Approximately 40% of this book is told in retrospect. It kills the pacing exactly as much as you think it would.
-It’s slow paced for grating reasons, like the alphabet soup of military acronyms that are thrown around constantly and left to the reader to either know or look up. And some monologues are full pages of text, no paragraph breaks.
-By halfway through the book we had somewhere between 8-12 POV shifts. I stopped counting because I only cared about two and a half of them. That’s the problem with having large numbers of POVs, the reader is always going to have favorites and be resentful when the perspective changes to someone they don’t care about.
-The book is trying to be too many things. First contact, bio-containment, military escapade, space battle, ect. It's too much packed into one novel and it ends up killing pacing and not being fully satisfying at anything.
-The book is trying to be too many things. First contact, bio-containment, military escapade, space battle, ect. It's too much packed into one novel and it ends up killing pacing and not being fully satisfying at anything.
-It’s masturbatory. This is a little hard to describe, but there is this feeling a book has when the author writes something smart where you can just sense them jacking off to how brilliant they are. It reminds me unfavorably of many Orson Scott Card novels.
-The biggest sin is this book is not a standalone. The story is not complete. It’s set up for a book two. And I despised the ending and it’s justification with everything I have. And I resent the publisher for making no flag that this would be part of a series! I don’t read uncompleted series for person reasons, so discovering a book is part of one where one of the marketing points to it being so is infuriating.
-The biggest sin is this book is not a standalone. The story is not complete. It’s set up for a book two. And I despised the ending and it’s justification with everything I have. And I resent the publisher for making no flag that this would be part of a series! I don’t read uncompleted series for person reasons, so discovering a book is part of one where one of the marketing points to it being so is infuriating.