A review by frasersimons
Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T. Sullivan

Did not finish book. Stopped at 7%.

Gave it 30 pages—I usually give it 50–but couldn’t handle it. First of all, to Sue the first 10 pages as basically a fourth wall is wild. The priest may have well have turned to the camera and been like, I hope we don’t get bombed eh eh eh! But also, it’s boring and the perspective is broken. Probably, it’s trying to straddle the times when Pino has related parts of the story in great detail, and so it’s comfortable contextualizing certain exchanges and scenes, I’m guessing. Then, it pulls back and refuses information sometimes they you ought to be privy to based on what is established already, when Pino does provide that context, basically. Suddenly the other characters feel like nothing more than caricatures in plays, shouting their motivations and regurgitating trite war scene movie dialogue. 

Not my jam. Though, to be fair, I hardly like any war books anyway, so it would have had to be pretty stellar to keep my interest anyhow. Being boring and broken and trite in the first pages is not the way to do that.