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fishy27 's review for:
The Dead Take the A Train
by Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I am,,, disappointed with The Dead Take the A Train. I was bought in for the beginning, but eventually, the things I liked about it lost their spark and became repetitive, cringe, and uninspired.
Julie Crews becomes unfunny pretty quickly. She really doesn’t develop, like, at all during this book, which makes it difficult to feel like there’s actually any movement happening. Instead of character development from Julie, we just get more POVs to build out the antagonist. The additional POVs felt like a huge cop-out of writing actually interesting characters, more interested in convincing readers that this book should be categorized as horror with gore for the sake of it.
The worst part about this complaint is that I actually did really enjoy the POVs that weren’t from Julie. I thought she was annoying, dull, and too heavily plot armored, and the other POVs developed the world and plot in interesting ways.
The most frustrating part of this book, however, is the fact that I didn't really feel like there was a good reason for the book to end when it did? There was very little resolution for any of the problems that had been explored in this book; if anything, it just felt like a setup for subsequent books, and I hate when authors do that.
The magic system was chaotic and disorganized. I have no idea how the magic in this world works, and it felt thrown together with whatever the authors thought of. I didn’t like the inconsistencies, and I didn’t like not being able to really predict what a viable solution could be.
The satire element is interesting for a while, but again, all of Julie’s existence feels overdone and annoying after a while.
Sick cover though.
Julie Crews becomes unfunny pretty quickly. She really doesn’t develop, like, at all during this book, which makes it difficult to feel like there’s actually any movement happening. Instead of character development from Julie, we just get more POVs to build out the antagonist. The additional POVs felt like a huge cop-out of writing actually interesting characters, more interested in convincing readers that this book should be categorized as horror with gore for the sake of it.
The worst part about this complaint is that I actually did really enjoy the POVs that weren’t from Julie. I thought she was annoying, dull, and too heavily plot armored, and the other POVs developed the world and plot in interesting ways.
The most frustrating part of this book, however, is the fact that I didn't really feel like there was a good reason for the book to end when it did? There was very little resolution for any of the problems that had been explored in this book; if anything, it just felt like a setup for subsequent books, and I hate when authors do that.
The magic system was chaotic and disorganized. I have no idea how the magic in this world works, and it felt thrown together with whatever the authors thought of. I didn’t like the inconsistencies, and I didn’t like not being able to really predict what a viable solution could be.
The satire element is interesting for a while, but again, all of Julie’s existence feels overdone and annoying after a while.
Sick cover though.