wintermute47 's review for:

Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky

2.0

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This was an absolute slog of a read. In fact, reading it was the literary equivalent of traveling on foot through the Moscow Metro after a world-ending apocalypse fills the tunnels with desperate, violent factions and bizarre mutants, so in one sense, the author did a great job. In another, less flippant sense, he goes on at excessive length with what seems to be an unholy union of the standard hero's journey narrative (young Artyom must carry a message from his home station to another station at the far end of the metro) and a 'Gulliver's Travels'-esque pseudo-satire of Russian history. I say pseudo because it's not clear to me that the author's intent was satirical and my grasp of Russian history is too weak for me to say for sure. The whole thing very definitely shows the seams where it was welded together from a series of blog posts--Artyom gets into deadly peril, and then is miraculously rescued time and again to the point where the author eventually has to lampshade his good luck, but by the time the explanation came I was long past caring.

It boggles my mind that the U.S. publisher is pushing this is a YA title, because I see zero chance that someone looking for the next 'The Hunger Games' would even finish 'Metro 2033.'