Phillip R Reed

Was looking for a light, schlocky, fun read with a oddball gimmick. Very much not what I found myself reading.

Couple chapters in, I'm really impressed with the writing - far better than I'd expected. And then I find it's not light, schlocky fun at all. It's not just good writing; it's well crafted, it's clever, it's coherent, it's got intriguing characterization, it's just a fine story.

Rich with misogyny. Unpleasant, spiteful stuff that's woven through the entirety and has zero relevance to plot or character. If I'm not mistaken, all the hateful epithets are from the good guys.

The main characters themselves are reasonably interesting (the secondary characters are notably flat) and the plot is fine. Not quite good, but fine. The writing is simply bad, however.

Long pages of info dump exposition followed a couple pages later by almost wotd-for-word repeats in dialogue. Multiple times. Swimming in overuse of adjectives. It feels like there's not a single noun without at least one adjective for the first few chapters. That lightens up, but it's still very heavily done. The pacing is fairly jerky, but not so much that it's painful to read.

My overall impression was that it feels as if the promising, but not polished, high school English student got a book deal and did his own editing. Except for that pointless slathering of misogyny. That feels more like some dudebro gleefully plotting date rape at his next party. Not the content of it, but it's very much that same nasty vibe.