God Touched

I tried to give this a fair shake. I actually stopped reading it and came back to it, which generally makes me much more generous to a book. I then kept going between it and another book and asking myself, “Is this really as bad as it seems?”

It's pretty terrible. I've read worse, but this still falls into the “laughably bad” category. If it had been written with even the slightest hint of self-awareness, I would have given it another star or even two, but I think he was trying to be serious!

The dialog is terrible. I have more realistic sounding conversations with my roommate's cat. The author is definitely a fan of “tell, don't show”. And what he has to tell us is the Saturday-morning cartoon version of character development. Not even the good Saturday morning ones - the failed ones that came on before most kids were up. I was half expecting his hero to suddenly develop eye lasers, just so that I would KNOW for a fact he was screwing with readers.

There's one section at the end, that develops into a totally unnecessary soft-science gloop of an explanation of several pieces of... the plot-like substance found here, given as highly detailed exposition between two characters... for one of whom it's totally out of place (except he's Ninja-Batman-Jesus). It was like reading a b-grade movie. I had to put down the book until I stopped laughing. So, points for that. I just don't think it was intentional.

The amount of wish fulfillment on display in the book is... well, it goes past funny into “mildly creepy”.

When I make the comparison to cartoons, I do not make it idly. If you watched cartoons as a kid, you may remember one-shot abilities that never show up again. Check! Boring female protagonists that exist primarily as a walking reason to be involved in this week's adventure, maybe also to be screen candy. Check!

It's just all-around... bad.