A review by chromiumboron
Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

2.0

I have a lot of feels about this book.

It was a roller coaster. I'd go through spells where I was really into it, and then I'd get so bored with it that I'd have to make myself read it just so I could get through it and start a new book (I'm not a quitter and can't really read two books at a time). I agree with most of the reviews I see - This story starts out great. It caught my interest, and I was excited to read about Carter's adventures, but I feel like it skipped over all of the exciting stuff. For example, I was super interested in this book when I got to the part where Carter

Spoiler

meets Sarah. It was a bit of a surprise, and I was really looking forward to reading about the adventures they have together, and then - BAM! She's dead. Another instance was when pirates took over Carter's boat. THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SO COOL.

But no, we just got a few pages that were slapdashed together in order to cover enough detail that we know this event happened. I just think more story development would have been nice. However, I also feel like this book was way too long for what it was. Part of that is maybe the fact that Gold went into a LOT of detail about stuff that didn't interest me. I mean, I didn't need to read a zillion pages about how

Spoiler

Griffin went down a coal shoot early in his career.

. Sure, it's a little bit relevant to the story later, but not enough to have warranted so much space in this book. If Gold was going to write a 600+ page story, couldn't he at least cut out some of the more boring stuff and gave us more details about Carter's adventures?
Finally,

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Phoebe and the whole She never died bit. I can't even begin to talk about how much she annoyed me, and I really think the story would have been better off if she was just some rando blind chick. The She never died thing got really old for me, and when they used it as some huge plot twist at the end, it bothered me, and I felt like Gold was trying too hard to make her character "badass" when he should have just wrote her as a "normal" (albeit blind) woman.

Girls are cool enough on their own; you don't need to give them corny dialogue!