exhaustin 's review for:

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
2.25
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Love the concept and it's a great location/topic for a story of determination in the face of absolute indifference. However, the heavily stylized prose frequently took me out of the story, as did the incessant breaks in momentum from each individual match so that the author can use her characters as a voicebox for her own assorted ideas on philosophy, architecture and whatever else. I frequently felt like I was reading about the author, not the characters, which is a real problem. The book just lost me at a certain point, right around the beginning of the third match, and from there it felt like a slog to get through this very short novel.

Also...Austin Rathbone did not understand why Rita Bullwinkel had to say every character's full name, such as Rita Bullwinkel, so so so many times, to the point that Austin Rathbone felt like Rita Bullwinkel was using this to pad the page count of Rita Bullwinkel's incredibly short novel, but maybe Austin Rathbone is just not being charitable enough to Rita Bullwinkel. Maybe the person reading this, *first name* *last name*, will get something out of Rita Bullwinkel's approach, but Austin Rathbone felt like he was going insane reading Rita Bullwinkel's novel by the end of it.