SK

Tried to finish this. Had a lot of interesting stuff going for it. The main character, named Hiro Protagonist (its so ridiculous to name his this that it actually works somehow), was rather interesting. He rides around on a motorcycle and wields a samurai sword better than anyone else in the world. OK, cool. I like this guy. He hacks computer. Cool. He teams up with a sassy teenage ‘delivery' girl named Y.T. who gets around town by using some type of magnetic grappling hook to latch onto cars as they drive down these futuristic highways. Alright, cool. Bad guy named Raven who is more badass than Hiro shows up. Alright, things are getting interesting.

Nam-shubs. What the fuck? Everything from here on out is completely gobbledygook. Language is a code just like computer code. Spells are virus made by words that take infect people and get spread by prostitutes. This caused the Tower of Babel. There is a televangelist who has a massive floating city made out of all sorts of random boats and is the richest man on the planet or something. He wants to spread some super spell/virus/code.

I gave up.

I don't understand why this book is so loved. Maybe my expectations were too high. It's been a few months since I read this book and I cant remember a single characters name. And I can only vaguely remember most of the plot. I guess that's the problem with this book. Everything about it is forgettable except for the feeling of ‘meh' I had the entire time reading it.

Super entertaining. Really wish Sanderson would write more stories about this ‘team' of detectives. Very original idea. One of the best novellas I've read in some time.

I kind of liked this book at first. But I just got more and more bored with the world and the humor as it went on. This might be the only book I've stopped reading 75% of the way through, I just didn't care enough to finish.

Enjoyable but very much felt like it was written only to build up momentum for the third book. (Which I haven't read yet)

I read a review someone that touted this book as ‘what Harry Potter could have been'. Yea, if you took out all the wonder and excitement from Harry Potter and replaced it with melancholy.

The first book in the series was somewhat enjoyable if only because the idea of a parallel universe where Neanderthals had survived instead of us is rather interesting. But once the novelty wore off I found a very boring story. Everything feels so cliched and forced. The Neanderthal society is used to show all the ways ours went wrong. Their society evolved into a gentle, tolerant, peace loving one while ours is violent, hypocritical and prone to warfare. This has been done a million times in science fiction (just replace the Neanderthals with some alien race).

How about developing a realistic culture for the Neanderthals and intellectually explore how their history and technology might be different from ours given their genetic and physical differences? The framework for the story has a lot of potential but instead retreads the same tired territory.