Scan barcode
kaitlynisliterate's reviews
332 reviews
Minds of Sand and Light by Kylie Chan
1.0
Wow, this book… was a hot mess. There are a few great moments but they’re mostly lost in the meandering plot and characters lacking depth.
The first few chapters of the book were pretty confusing. We are introduced to so many characters in the first chapter as we alternate between 3 different POVs. There’s Ruth and Cassie, the 7 sentient AIs, and Zheng’s crew of 4 or 5 people. Ruth is essentially the main character of this book but actually gets the least focus out of all the characters and gets lost in the chaotic introduction to the world.
Recalling the characters proves challenging, as they are either completely devoid of personality or one-dimensional side characters. Basically, no one in the whole book has a character arc or any character development. Ruth ends up exactly how she started: a flawless, mega-genius hacker. MIP/Theo is beyond generic, he’s just a nice guy with no independent motivations or goals other than helping Ruth. Botswana offers "quirky" comic relief, though its charm wears thin swiftly. Cassie’s personality amounts to happy-go-lucky and loves cats. Max is… there? Most of the other sentient AIs are basically indistinguishable from each other and essentially serve as personal assistants to the human characters for most of the book. This huge bloated cast of characters also means that there’s a lot of pointless, superfluous dialogue and conversations that go nowhere.
The relationship between MIP/Theo and Ruth seemed really forced and contrived. They haven’t even made it past the elevators before she asks him out and she’s supposed to be a journalist interviewing him! Their attraction to each other is constantly brought up in every interaction they have as if the reader would forget otherwise. Their friends are also way too invested in their potential relationship. Their relationship is literally compared to fanfic within the book itself and that is not really a compliment.
It’s pretty much expected (or at least accepted) that the sentient AIs, the “hacking,” and a lot of the tech in general are going to be unrealistic. That’s fine, it’s part of the readers’ suspension of disbelief when reading sci-fi. However, the technical capabilities of the AIs should at least be consistent instead of “whatever the plot requires at the moment.” The AIs have exponentially more processing capacity than humans (and also the ability to store huge amounts of data) so they can engage in all sorts of tech-wizardry for plot convenience—like disabling extensive camera networks. But since Ruth, a human, is the main character and is supposed to be a mega-genius, the AIs have to be dumbed down whenever required so that Ruth can prove that she’s so incredibly smart. It’s frustrating to be told that the AIs are capable of running highly accurate models to evaluate future probabilities but are also unable to do basic debugging. Ruth, a human, is able to solve coding problems (in just 5 minutes!) that the sentient AIs can’t figure out even though this is supposed to be the exact thing that AIs excel at. And she's not just equal to the AIs abilities but supposedly three times better.
For example, when they’re removing self-destructs from Zheng’s code, London, a sentient AI, says that Ruth is the only programmer in the whole world who could possibly debug this code. Ruth’s amazing suggestion which no one else in the world could have come up with is to “look at the self-destruct codes that we’ve already identified and see if there’s anything in common.” I mean, she literally spends most of the time fixing simple syntax errors in the code.
The book also has a huge problem with telling instead of showing. We are constantly told things about the world or the characters which are then not reflected in the actual text. We are told Ruth and Cassie have trauma from their past but this never actually affects how they behave (presumably because that would be too inconvenient to the plot). We are told that the AIs are brutally pragmatic and lack compassion/emotion but all of the AIs that we meet act basically exclusively on their emotions (presumably because if decisions were actually made pragmatically, there would be no story or at least none involving Ruth).
The reason why it felt like it took me so long to get through this book is because the plot is not building towards anything so there’s no sense of rising tension or escalating conflict. There’s no mystery to solve or evil plot to prevent, everyone is basically just responding to random events as they occur with no particular goal. For the first half of the book, the characters are sent on these one-off missions or tasks that result in basically nothing, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. The supposed central conflict is whether the Council will destroy humanity to prevent ecological ruin but nothing that happens in the first 90% of the book relates to this at all.
The actual resolution to this “destroy or save humanity” plot is also another case of telling instead of showing. We’re told by Cassie (and confirmed by the sentient AIs) that saving humanity from itself will require limiting freedoms but then we’re never told what exactly that would entail. Presumably, this would mean significant, mostly unwilling lifestyle changes but we’re never shown any of the characters subsequently changing their behaviors. I mean literally the next chapter is MIP and Ruth on a fancy date but like, is that reducing their carbon footprint??? Are we even trying here?
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
The first few chapters of the book were pretty confusing. We are introduced to so many characters in the first chapter as we alternate between 3 different POVs. There’s Ruth and Cassie, the 7 sentient AIs, and Zheng’s crew of 4 or 5 people. Ruth is essentially the main character of this book but actually gets the least focus out of all the characters and gets lost in the chaotic introduction to the world.
Recalling the characters proves challenging, as they are either completely devoid of personality or one-dimensional side characters. Basically, no one in the whole book has a character arc or any character development. Ruth ends up exactly how she started: a flawless, mega-genius hacker. MIP/Theo is beyond generic, he’s just a nice guy with no independent motivations or goals other than helping Ruth. Botswana offers "quirky" comic relief, though its charm wears thin swiftly. Cassie’s personality amounts to happy-go-lucky and loves cats. Max is… there? Most of the other sentient AIs are basically indistinguishable from each other and essentially serve as personal assistants to the human characters for most of the book. This huge bloated cast of characters also means that there’s a lot of pointless, superfluous dialogue and conversations that go nowhere.
The relationship between MIP/Theo and Ruth seemed really forced and contrived. They haven’t even made it past the elevators before she asks him out and she’s supposed to be a journalist interviewing him! Their attraction to each other is constantly brought up in every interaction they have as if the reader would forget otherwise. Their friends are also way too invested in their potential relationship. Their relationship is literally compared to fanfic within the book itself and that is not really a compliment.
It’s pretty much expected (or at least accepted) that the sentient AIs, the “hacking,” and a lot of the tech in general are going to be unrealistic. That’s fine, it’s part of the readers’ suspension of disbelief when reading sci-fi. However, the technical capabilities of the AIs should at least be consistent instead of “whatever the plot requires at the moment.” The AIs have exponentially more processing capacity than humans (and also the ability to store huge amounts of data) so they can engage in all sorts of tech-wizardry for plot convenience—like disabling extensive camera networks. But since Ruth, a human, is the main character and is supposed to be a mega-genius, the AIs have to be dumbed down whenever required so that Ruth can prove that she’s so incredibly smart. It’s frustrating to be told that the AIs are capable of running highly accurate models to evaluate future probabilities but are also unable to do basic debugging. Ruth, a human, is able to solve coding problems (in just 5 minutes!) that the sentient AIs can’t figure out even though this is supposed to be the exact thing that AIs excel at. And she's not just equal to the AIs abilities but supposedly three times better.
The book also has a huge problem with telling instead of showing. We are constantly told things about the world or the characters which are then not reflected in the actual text. We are told Ruth and Cassie have trauma from their past but this never actually affects how they behave (presumably because that would be too inconvenient to the plot). We are told that the AIs are brutally pragmatic and lack compassion/emotion but all of the AIs that we meet act basically exclusively on their emotions (presumably because if decisions were actually made pragmatically, there would be no story or at least none involving Ruth).
The reason why it felt like it took me so long to get through this book is because the plot is not building towards anything so there’s no sense of rising tension or escalating conflict. There’s no mystery to solve or evil plot to prevent, everyone is basically just responding to random events as they occur with no particular goal. For the first half of the book, the characters are sent on these one-off missions or tasks that result in basically nothing, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. The supposed central conflict is whether the Council will destroy humanity to prevent ecological ruin but nothing that happens in the first 90% of the book relates to this at all.
The actual resolution to this “destroy or save humanity” plot is also another case of telling instead of showing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Never Coming Home by Hannah Mary McKinnon
4.5
I love love love a gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss story.
The Coworker by Freida McFadden
3.0
I am unbelievably excited to have received an ARC for Freida McFadden’s newest book, considering I read essentially her entire back catalog this year. This book starts off really strong and I particularly enjoyed the use of Dawn’s emails as a narrative device and for exposition.
The key to reading a Freida McFadden book (and a lot of other psychological thrillers) is to suspend your disbelief and not dwell too much on the details or else the whole plot falls apart. For example, you just have to accept the way that the police investigation is conducted even if it’s completely unrealistic or nonsensical (eg: they never look into Natalie’s finances despite that being the primary motive).
However, there is a limit to that suspension of disbelief and it’s especially tested when main characters start behaving completely contrary to how they’ve been portrayed for 80% of the book. I have to say that I’m pretty let down by the ending. While the characterization had been relatively consistent for Part 1 of the book, it suddenly goes off the rails for the sake of a few last-minute plot twists. In particular, Dawn’s behavior in the last few chapters didn’t make sense to me, and way too many decisions are hand-waved away by playing the “love fixes all” card.
I also felt like the book spent way too much time on, what I can only assume is, a red herring subplot about Vixen’s products. Random people basically pop up to yell at Natalie and then are never mentioned again. It doesn’t add anything to the story since there it’s never even implied to be related to Dawn’s disappearance. Natalie certainly doesn’t dwell on it for more than half a second.
Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
The key to reading a Freida McFadden book (and a lot of other psychological thrillers) is to suspend your disbelief and not dwell too much on the details or else the whole plot falls apart. For example, you just have to accept the way that the police investigation is conducted even if it’s completely unrealistic or nonsensical
However, there is a limit to that suspension of disbelief and it’s especially tested when main characters start behaving completely contrary to how they’ve been portrayed for 80% of the book. I have to say that I’m pretty let down by the ending. While the characterization had been relatively consistent for Part 1 of the book, it suddenly goes off the rails for the sake of a few last-minute plot twists.
I also felt like the book spent way too much time on, what I can only assume is, a red herring subplot about Vixen’s products. Random people basically pop up to yell at Natalie and then are never mentioned again. It doesn’t add anything to the story since there it’s never even implied to be related to Dawn’s disappearance. Natalie certainly doesn’t dwell on it for more than half a second.
Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
The One That Got Away with Murder by Trish Lundy
3.75
A very compelling debut novel!
YA female main characters are usually very hit or miss for me and I have to say, I really liked Lauren. I felt like she had a really clear internal voice and acted her age, even if that resulted in some more than questionable decisions. I especially liked how Lauren and Robbie’s relationship did not take over the whole book. Their focus was appropriately on the actual murders taking place around them.
I really appreciated how there was always more than 1 viable suspect until the very end. Some murder mysteries make identifying the real killer too obvious by spending a lot of time developing a random minor character, which can only be for the purpose of a big plot twist reveal.
The author mostly avoided using Gen Z references that won’t age well (though I’ve never seen music described as alt-J-esque). However, there are some YA tropes that I personally don’t like. For example, there’s a Gossip Girl type Instagram account that posts rumours/gossip about the students.
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh
4.0
An enthralling whirlwind of a story that kept me absolutely engrossed!
Apart from the gripping plot, the characters exhibited remarkable depth and complexity. The main character, Amanda, is morally grey and the author deftly handles the dilemmas that she faces. Even better was the main antagonist who is difficult to not feel empathy towards, at least in the beginning. The loss of a loved one is dealt with extremely compassionately and the book showcases the myriad of ways people deal with grief.
Even though it seems obvious in retrospect, I did not put together the main plot twist until it happened. However, the ending of the book started to get a little bit out of hand and strain my suspension of disbelief. The last few plot twists started to feel forced and somewhat contrived as characters began behaving in ways opposite to how they had been written previously.
I also think this book struggled to juggle its multiple POVs. In particular, Farrow’s POV seemed to exist solely to provide exposition as his character wasn’t particularly interesting or unique.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta
2.0
This book had a lot of promise but ultimately fell short of the mark.
I enjoyed the magical realism and how Jamaican folklore/legend was incorporated into the story. The protagonist, Alicia, struck a chord with me as I empathized with her struggles to adapt after graduating from university.
Regrettably, the promise of the book wasn't fully realized in its plot. Rather than embarking on an enthralling journey, the plot resembled a lackluster side quest from a video game, the kind that involves mundane tasks to fill time.
The comb is, for all intents and purposes, a MacGuffin. The only reason it’s important is because its owner is a deity, the River Mumma, who has threatened a massive drought if it is not returned by an arbitrary (by their own admission) deadline. This isn’t necessarily bad but it leads to a lack of investment, on the part of the reader, in the goal of the quest. So without a particularly compelling goal, all that’s left is the journey which, unfortunately, isn’t particularly interesting either. Most of the quest to find the comb consists of Alicia, Mars, and Heaven traveling from point A to B.
The main character, Alicia, is never challenged in any way since each obstacle is solved by either looking information up online or running away. Alicia never has to use any particular skills or even be clever to solve a problem or move the quest forward. This in turn led Alicia to lack a certain sense of agency since she’s always just responding to things that happen to her.
Curiously absent is a substantial antagonist since the person who stole the comb doesn’t particularly care about keeping it, while the pursuing duppies merely offer mindless opposition. The duppies sort of just appear whenever the story needed some action but it never feels like they present any significant threat. Every duppy has the same two weakness which is that they must stop to count whatever is thrown in their path and they dislike salt.
The pacing of this story also felt off. One of the reasons for this was how often the story stopped in its tracks to make some little inside joke or reference for fellow Torontonians. While I personally understood the references, I don’t think someone not from Toronto would. I’m surprised they didn’t make a joke about Tim’s iced coffee tasting different every time. Though I lived in Toronto for many years, even I found these asides distracting. It’s not any less annoying than when New Yorkers do it!
The other issue with the pacing was how elements of the story connected, or rather failed to connect, with each other. For example, Alicia experiences visions of the memories of her ancestors. These visions take up a lot of pages and serve to explain Alicia’s ancestors’ connection to River Mumma. However, the visions don’t explain why Alicia, specifically, was chosen for this specific quest since her ancestors have no connection to the comb. The visions provide no information to help Alicia and her friends find the comb. The entire story also takes place within an extremely short time frame (around 24 hours). These two facts combined with how the story starts off pretty slow and takes a while to ramp up, the actual quest to retrieve the comb was given relatively few pages and thus the resolution seemed fairly rushed. In fact, for the first 2/3 of the book, they make no progress on finding who stole the comb (the first step in retrieving the comb), but this is solved for the characters by deus ex machina. So the whole quest takes up only 1/3 of the book.
This book also features a certain Toronto-based celebrity rapper who remains unnamed but it’s extremely obvious who it is. I admit that I found this pretty funny when it was first revealed but the joke quickly got old. It ended up being pretty gimmicky and the whole encounter felt really forced (we’re supposed to believe that this huge celebrity is checking their DM requests 24/7).
Finally, at least half of the dialogue is in Jamaican patois (and/or Toronto slang) and if you, like me, are not fluent, it might take you a second to understand what the characters are saying. This linguistic barrier disrupts the reading flow and comprehension.
In sum, magical realism and the representation of Jamaican culture and folklore shine, yet the weak plot and pacing pitfalls tarnish the overall experience.
Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
I enjoyed the magical realism and how Jamaican folklore/legend was incorporated into the story. The protagonist, Alicia, struck a chord with me as I empathized with her struggles to adapt after graduating from university.
Regrettably, the promise of the book wasn't fully realized in its plot. Rather than embarking on an enthralling journey, the plot resembled a lackluster side quest from a video game, the kind that involves mundane tasks to fill time.
The comb is, for all intents and purposes, a MacGuffin. The only reason it’s important is because its owner is a deity, the River Mumma, who has threatened a massive drought if it is not returned by an arbitrary (by their own admission) deadline. This isn’t necessarily bad but it leads to a lack of investment, on the part of the reader, in the goal of the quest. So without a particularly compelling goal, all that’s left is the journey which, unfortunately, isn’t particularly interesting either. Most of the quest to find the comb consists of Alicia, Mars, and Heaven traveling from point A to B.
The main character, Alicia, is never challenged in any way since each obstacle is solved by either looking information up online or running away. Alicia never has to use any particular skills or even be clever to solve a problem or move the quest forward. This in turn led Alicia to lack a certain sense of agency since she’s always just responding to things that happen to her.
Curiously absent is a substantial antagonist since the person who stole the comb doesn’t particularly care about keeping it, while the pursuing duppies merely offer mindless opposition. The duppies sort of just appear whenever the story needed some action but it never feels like they present any significant threat. Every duppy has the same two weakness which is that they must stop to count whatever is thrown in their path and they dislike salt.
The pacing of this story also felt off. One of the reasons for this was how often the story stopped in its tracks to make some little inside joke or reference for fellow Torontonians. While I personally understood the references, I don’t think someone not from Toronto would. I’m surprised they didn’t make a joke about Tim’s iced coffee tasting different every time. Though I lived in Toronto for many years, even I found these asides distracting. It’s not any less annoying than when New Yorkers do it!
The other issue with the pacing was how elements of the story connected, or rather failed to connect, with each other. For example, Alicia experiences visions of the memories of her ancestors. These visions take up a lot of pages and serve to explain Alicia’s ancestors’ connection to River Mumma. However, the visions don’t explain why Alicia, specifically, was chosen for this specific quest since her ancestors have no connection to the comb. The visions provide no information to help Alicia and her friends find the comb. The entire story also takes place within an extremely short time frame (around 24 hours). These two facts combined with how the story starts off pretty slow and takes a while to ramp up, the actual quest to retrieve the comb was given relatively few pages and thus the resolution seemed fairly rushed. In fact, for the first 2/3 of the book, they make no progress on finding who stole the comb (the first step in retrieving the comb), but this is solved for the characters by deus ex machina. So the whole quest takes up only 1/3 of the book.
This book also features a certain Toronto-based celebrity rapper who remains unnamed but it’s extremely obvious who it is. I admit that I found this pretty funny when it was first revealed but the joke quickly got old. It ended up being pretty gimmicky and the whole encounter felt really forced (we’re supposed to believe that this huge celebrity is checking their DM requests 24/7).
Finally, at least half of the dialogue is in Jamaican patois (and/or Toronto slang) and if you, like me, are not fluent, it might take you a second to understand what the characters are saying. This linguistic barrier disrupts the reading flow and comprehension.
In sum, magical realism and the representation of Jamaican culture and folklore shine, yet the weak plot and pacing pitfalls tarnish the overall experience.
Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
3.75
A bit hard to get into in the beginning, especially with so many POV switches, but everything comes together in the end.