A review by jayden_chancery
Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry

adventurous dark tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

I will start off by saying that this book was read as a class assignment. I know that many of my classmates enjoyed the book even went on to read the rest of the series.

That said, this book was not good. IN MY OPINION.

I found many if not all of the characters extremely unlikable. And every time I started to like one of them they would do something to ruin that. I couldn’t even have a favorite character because of how bad all of them behaved. And this is not to say that misbehaving characters can’t be a good thing, in many books it helps keep you entertained and create new problems. But in this story it felt like it was simply written in for the heck of it.

Throughout the book but especially in the beginning, characters and/or the narrator would say weird or inappropriate things. Such as
when both characters and the narrator refer to a TEENAGE girl as having a large chest
.  It was gross to read and listen too (yes i read both versions).

The plot? What plot? SERIOUSLY WHAT WAS THE PLOT?? I couldn’t tell you. I understand that this is the first book in a series, but you could at least get us to an exciting part before we’re 4/5 of the way through the book! It was boring and, honestly, if it wasn’t assigned reading it would have been in my DNF list very quickly. 

Overall, it wasn’t entertaining, it wasn’t well written, the characters made me annoyed and grossed out, and i did not like it. I will not be reading the rest of the series. But my classmates have said that “it gets better”. I would sure hope so. 
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