Eric
Feels like this was written with the goal to be adapted into a movie. The premise is cool - a young woman's job is to infiltrate the minds of her company's field agents to help them escape desperate situations, using advanced tech so she can see floor plans and assess risk ratios while controlling their bodies. Something goes wrong on a mission that forces her to flee. She meets a guy who, it turns out, is trying to uncover a conspiracy and bring the woman's company down. All that is good: the plot is exciting, the writing is smooth, and the ideas are interesting.
The biggest surprise (and let-down, for me as an adult man) was the YA enemies-to-lovers romance trope, which is pretty thick throughout the book. Wasn't a dealbreaker and wasn't salacious, just kinda boring/tired. But I know people like that trope, so if you're into sci-fi/tech and romance, this might hit your sweet spot.
Side-note: the repeated use of the phrase Christ-that-was is an obvious attempt by the author to create a "calling card"/in-joke for superfans of the series that made me cringe every time I read it.
Feels like this was written with the goal to be adapted into a movie. The premise is cool - a young woman's job is to infiltrate the minds of her company's field agents to help them escape desperate situations, using advanced tech so she can see floor plans and assess risk ratios while controlling their bodies. Something goes wrong on a mission that forces her to flee. She meets a guy who, it turns out, is trying to uncover a conspiracy and bring the woman's company down. All that is good: the plot is exciting, the writing is smooth, and the ideas are interesting.
The biggest surprise (and let-down, for me as an adult man) was the YA enemies-to-lovers romance trope, which is pretty thick throughout the book. Wasn't a dealbreaker and wasn't salacious, just kinda boring/tired. But I know people like that trope, so if you're into sci-fi/tech and romance, this might hit your sweet spot.
Side-note: the repeated use of the phrase Christ-that-was is an obvious attempt by the author to create a "calling card"/in-joke for superfans of the series that made me cringe every time I read it.
So-so on this one. A really fun premise and some really yummy awfulness in the first half that kinda flattened out in the second as the author needed to figure out some kind of plot. The narrator's weird psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is delightful and a highlight of the book. Reva is perfectly drawn as a significant/insignificant side character for the narrator. The semi-comatose trip to Reva's family home was great. I wish some inner (or outer) development in the two major conflicts for the narrator - grieving her troubled relationship with her dead parents, and reconciling her terrible years-long relationship with Trevor - were a larger factor in explaining *why* she is able to come out of her Infermiterol bender in a better place, instead of the thinly-wrought blackout relationship with Ping Xi and then magically being okay selling her parent's house and going outside to watch dogs on a park bench. Dunno, seemed kinda convenient that the first 8 months or whatever saw zero character growth and the last stunt was perfectly successful. I really liked how it was set just-enough before September 11, 2001 that you wondered the whole book if that event would be included or not. Overall it was a pretty fun doomer/goblin-mode read.
So-so on this one. A really fun premise and some really yummy awfulness in the first half that kinda flattened out in the second as the author needed to figure out some kind of plot. The narrator's weird psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is delightful and a highlight of the book. Reva is perfectly drawn as a significant/insignificant side character for the narrator. The semi-comatose trip to Reva's family home was great. I wish some inner (or outer) development in the two major conflicts for the narrator - grieving her troubled relationship with her dead parents, and reconciling her terrible years-long relationship with Trevor - were a larger factor in explaining *why* she is able to come out of her Infermiterol bender in a better place, instead of the thinly-wrought blackout relationship with Ping Xi and then magically being okay selling her parent's house and going outside to watch dogs on a park bench. Dunno, seemed kinda convenient that the first 8 months or whatever saw zero character growth and the last stunt was perfectly successful. I really liked how it was set just-enough before September 11, 2001 that you wondered the whole book if that event would be included or not. Overall it was a pretty fun doomer/goblin-mode read.
