This book tried to make Fetch happen. Fetch did not happen.
January is a new record for my first one star book of the year. I made it to the end of October last year before I uno-dubbed my first book. I can’t believe I actually finished the book, but the premise (what drew me to it in the first place) was too intriguing, so I had to know how it ended. Honestly, what I found was worse than mid-book-me could have imagined. This book was a hot convoluted mess. The longer it went on, the messier, and yet somehow more uninteresting it got.
The main problem with this book is that I just don’t think this author can write very well. I laughed out loud when I saw that another reviewer had pointed out that “quite frankly i do not need to be a published author to know that you cannot hide your own awful prose by saying that your protagonist is a bad writer.” And this really might be on me for not DNFing in the first chapter like I sort of wanted to, because there were bad-writing red flags all over the place. I actually don’t like when people say “the writing was bad”* because that means 10,000 different things and is way too vague a criticism to mean anything at all.
*Saying the prose was bad is actually pretty specific. Prose is a part of writing, the actual stringing of words together to create meaning. But so is: characterization, plotting, pacing, dialogue, transitions, and knowing when you have put too much or too little on the page, along with thousands of other things. They all encompass “writing.”
So, to elaborate:
*The prose was not good: Sentence fragments all over the place, figurative language that made absolutely zero sense (see the title of this review), terrible dialogue, excessive dialogue, at times overly descriptive, others not enough. The actual writing made the story feel disjointed, and I don’t think that was a stylistic choice.
*The book was way, way, way too long. There is an unbelievable amount of repetition in this book, perhaps to cover the lack of characterization or the lack of relationships between characters. Or maybe this just didn’t have enough meat to cover the full sandwich, if you know what I mean.
*This is a meta book, but meta books need to have depth by necessity, otherwise what is the point of the meta. Here it just seems to be for show. Show me an endless series of mirrors and get me confused by all the reflections, and the reflections of reflections, and hope I don’t notice the subject of those reflections doesn’t exist.
*Relatedly, this author seems to be of the variety that believes making something more elaborate, to the point of confusion, is the same as being clever. Throwing twist after twist at the reader does not make your book have more depth. Confusing the reader so badly that they lose their bearings entirely is not good storytelling.
*THIS BOOK DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.
*Also, this isn’t a criticism I throw out lightly, but I’m pretty sure it has ableism at its core. This is spoilers, so beware and skip ahead if you don’t want that. SPOILERS The entire plot hinges on the “main character” Jewel/Carol being mentally unstable, but her instability means nothing, she is just labeled as “crazy” by the other characters, that “craziness” is never explored (I’m pretty sure any clinical diagnosis this character would have doesn’t exist), and is in fact used by them to further their own ends END SPOILERS. The reveal of SPOILERS Carol being insane END SPOILERS is The Plot Twist, and that’s as far as it goes. It’s kind of gross. But more importantly, it’s terrible storytelling.
*Nothing in this book was scary? Or tense? Or thrilling? Absolutely nothing at all. I could have fallen asleep at any point while reading and dreamed of bunnies and unicorns frolicking with kittens. There was no satisfying exploration of anything at all related to human darkness, just lots of cardboard cutouts saying weird things and an occasional puddle of blood.
*The book within a book was one of the worst things I’ve ever read.
In summation, this was a horrible reading experience, I am disappointed, angry, confused, mad about being confused, and I have a headache. The cover and the premise get an A, though. They did their jobs, I bought this book full price.
