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A review by dtaylorbooks
Shadow of a Dead Star by Michael Shean
How did we end up here?
This was part of my Curiosity Quills intake that I got about a year ago. It’s a bit outside of my normal reading repertoire but it sounds dark and gritty and something that I would like anyway so I decided to go for it. The worst that I could happen was that I didn’t like it.
DNF
And really I stopped reading it not because I didn’t like what I was reading but I just wasn’t connecting with it. I got a little more than fifty pages in and I found myself skimming most of it. I found the writing to be a bit more concerned with technicalities of weapons, maneuvers and detail-oriented world-building than building me a good story with characters that I gave a damn about. The shock factor of this sexually deviant deviant technology-driven world where little girls are zombified with computers and turned into sex slaves isn’t a shocking enough element alone to keep me interested. It’s not really that far-fetched for this future story. There was nothing about Walken that hooked me into his character; I knew nothing about him except he was some kind of federal agent and the sex trade sickened him. Not enough. I knew more about the schematics of his ceramic (lost me on that one) gun than I did about him. I don’t want to connect with an inanimate object; I want to connect with a person and I wasn’t getting it.
The writing was pretty decent and I didn’t have any issues with the pace of the story. I just felt the focus was off and I was getting too much of things I didn’t care about and not enough of the stuff I should have.
This was part of my Curiosity Quills intake that I got about a year ago. It’s a bit outside of my normal reading repertoire but it sounds dark and gritty and something that I would like anyway so I decided to go for it. The worst that I could happen was that I didn’t like it.
DNF
And really I stopped reading it not because I didn’t like what I was reading but I just wasn’t connecting with it. I got a little more than fifty pages in and I found myself skimming most of it. I found the writing to be a bit more concerned with technicalities of weapons, maneuvers and detail-oriented world-building than building me a good story with characters that I gave a damn about. The shock factor of this sexually deviant deviant technology-driven world where little girls are zombified with computers and turned into sex slaves isn’t a shocking enough element alone to keep me interested. It’s not really that far-fetched for this future story. There was nothing about Walken that hooked me into his character; I knew nothing about him except he was some kind of federal agent and the sex trade sickened him. Not enough. I knew more about the schematics of his ceramic (lost me on that one) gun than I did about him. I don’t want to connect with an inanimate object; I want to connect with a person and I wasn’t getting it.
The writing was pretty decent and I didn’t have any issues with the pace of the story. I just felt the focus was off and I was getting too much of things I didn’t care about and not enough of the stuff I should have.