/lit/ - Literature

This was embarrassingly bad. To start, her dialogue is so stilted I can barely believe a human could imagine people conversing that way. Every conversation is built out of tired cliche's, half-formed bon mots, and cryptic allusions to events the reader has no reason to care about. Perhaps the author knows her dialogue is terrible, and that's why she feels the need to interrupt all of them with absurd set pieces, like when the alligators attacked, or when the giant robot centipede attacked, or when the werewolves attacked, etc. Even beyond those lazy conflicts, the plot is absolute nonsense, highlighted best by the contradiction of how competent we are told all the characters ought to be and how grossly stupid they are in fact. That the archvillain, a man who has eluded the secret organization for five centuries, could spend several days in the company of the macguffin and fail to notice simply because he didn't have the curiosity to open a book shaped package is retarded. But worse, assuredly, is the scene where the main character's fellow agent literally poisons her with a potentially lethal paralytic in the middle of their mission for no reason other than to satisfy her petty dislike. The main character's junior agent is equally poorly written, if differently. His character seems to change from chapter to chapter, with little to tie his personality together. The author has the gall to intimate that this might be on purpose, that his shifting is the natural personality of a talented spy, but for that to work from a narrative perspective we must be shown the core individual that he is playing against, something she fails to give us. In every way this book feels like it was written by an amateur and edited not at all.
3/10 would not recommend.