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A review by bottomofthebookshelf
Athena's Choice by Adam Boostrom
2.0
*Thank you to the author and Book Sirens for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review*
As soon as I read the synopsis for this book I was excited. A world without men and a mystery to boot? Sign me up! The futuristic ideas were interesting, and when I started reading the book I found myself intrigued with the world building. Unfortunately for me, that’s where the fun stopped.
Firstly, I felt no connection to the characters. Not even our main character, Athena. We didn’t get a ton of character development and the conversations between characters didn’t seem realistic to me, so I felt like we never really got to know any of the characters on a deeper level. On top of that, I found Athena and Nomi’s relationship confusing until near the end of the book (where I was left less confused, but still confused). Because of this, I found myself not feeling any emotions while reading scenes that were clearly supposed to stir up said emotions.
Next, the plot was just really messy for me. From the very beginning, nothing felt believable and a lot of things just didn’t make logical sense. There are certain details I thought would be explained, that never were. The pacing was so quick that I felt like the main character didn’t even have time to react to what was going on before the next thing happened.
Lastly, I wasn’t a fan of the writing style. A lot of backstory information was given to the reader via web articles, school work, and news stories in between chapters. This format just really killed the flow of the book for me and I felt like there must be a smoother way to integrate all of this into the story. Also, I was super duper disappointed by the ambiguous ending.
In conclusion, this book just didn’t live up to my expectations. I think it had a great premise, but unfortunately it just wasn’t executed that well in my opinion.
As soon as I read the synopsis for this book I was excited. A world without men and a mystery to boot? Sign me up! The futuristic ideas were interesting, and when I started reading the book I found myself intrigued with the world building. Unfortunately for me, that’s where the fun stopped.
Firstly, I felt no connection to the characters. Not even our main character, Athena. We didn’t get a ton of character development and the conversations between characters didn’t seem realistic to me, so I felt like we never really got to know any of the characters on a deeper level. On top of that, I found Athena and Nomi’s relationship confusing until near the end of the book (where I was left less confused, but still confused). Because of this, I found myself not feeling any emotions while reading scenes that were clearly supposed to stir up said emotions.
Next, the plot was just really messy for me. From the very beginning, nothing felt believable and a lot of things just didn’t make logical sense. There are certain details I thought would be explained, that never were. The pacing was so quick that I felt like the main character didn’t even have time to react to what was going on before the next thing happened.
Lastly, I wasn’t a fan of the writing style. A lot of backstory information was given to the reader via web articles, school work, and news stories in between chapters. This format just really killed the flow of the book for me and I felt like there must be a smoother way to integrate all of this into the story. Also, I was super duper disappointed by the ambiguous ending.
In conclusion, this book just didn’t live up to my expectations. I think it had a great premise, but unfortunately it just wasn’t executed that well in my opinion.