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A review by em_harring
Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun
3.0
*Per FTC guidelines, I received this book from Edelweiss. I'm not being paid for my review.*
This book sounds pretty perfect. Dystopian world where people can't sleep? Awesome. In reality? Kind of boring. Don't get me wrong, there are some awesome, chilling moments in the book, which were enjoyable. Particularly a section where we get the POV of two characters (that we never see again--with reason) who are being affected by the disorder and their baby. Very chilling section. And there were other cool dystopian scenes that were very realistic in how they were written. I liked those parts. But, those parts were sandwiched in by a lot of different people walking around saying the same things over and over again. I must have read the phrase "it was like the world was turned inside out" at least five times. I get it.
What hurt this book is that it felt like a really long short story. And it bounced between characters with seemingly no rhyme nor reason as to why it was, completely leaving out different areas of time where things happened, which was sort of confusing. The characters were pretty underdeveloped, too. There was potential in Biggs and Felicia (clearly the strongest characters), but even they are lacking because there's time devoted to other characters who aren't developed. (I didn't care for Chase at all.)
And I would have liked more of a concrete ending to all of the characters. One kind of just disappears. Am I to assume she died?
Overall, there were cool moments, and the book gets props for its premise. But, it didn't quite achieve what it set out to do.
This book sounds pretty perfect. Dystopian world where people can't sleep? Awesome. In reality? Kind of boring. Don't get me wrong, there are some awesome, chilling moments in the book, which were enjoyable. Particularly a section where we get the POV of two characters (that we never see again--with reason) who are being affected by the disorder and their baby. Very chilling section. And there were other cool dystopian scenes that were very realistic in how they were written. I liked those parts. But, those parts were sandwiched in by a lot of different people walking around saying the same things over and over again. I must have read the phrase "it was like the world was turned inside out" at least five times. I get it.
What hurt this book is that it felt like a really long short story. And it bounced between characters with seemingly no rhyme nor reason as to why it was, completely leaving out different areas of time where things happened, which was sort of confusing. The characters were pretty underdeveloped, too. There was potential in Biggs and Felicia (clearly the strongest characters), but even they are lacking because there's time devoted to other characters who aren't developed. (I didn't care for Chase at all.)
And I would have liked more of a concrete ending to all of the characters. One kind of just disappears. Am I to assume she died?
Overall, there were cool moments, and the book gets props for its premise. But, it didn't quite achieve what it set out to do.