From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I really dislike pretentious novels and this one was up there. It was also mixed voice in the sense that most of it was third person, but on occasion there was first person. I'm not a fan of mixed voice novels, and even less a fan of first person. I liked that the story hit the ground running, but there was a narrative and a dialogue that was not only obtuse, but was also larded with the kind of language that would make Deadpool blush. This is not a compliment, since I have no interest in reading either of these writers, but the novel is like the unfortunate bastard child of William Gibson and Bret Easton Ellis. I never liked Ellis. I used to like Gibson, but he quickly went downhill for me.
The story is futuristic cyber-punk, and it's one of these over-baked, aggressive books about tough-as-nails characters (in this case, female) who are so hardened and foul-mouthed that it's like a parody. I don't care about four-letter words here and there in a story, but this thing is so thickly-larded with them that it's hard to read. On top of that, the author seemed like she couldn't write a sentence without pulling out the thesaurus, so the text is dense and impenetrable in many places. I'm pretty well-educated, but this made for a really tough read, and not so much because the words were beyond my reading range, but because there was so much of this hyperbolic stuff that it really made it nightmarish to go through. How about this for a random sentence: "The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget." It's all like that, and it's too much - especially so for a novel in this genre.
The plot was simple, but it was all-but obliterated by the writing style. I ended up not so much reading it, as reading bits and skimming chunks. There was a team of female cyber-enhanced and cloned warrior women who had a sorry end to their last mission. Now some of them want to find out why it went so badly wrong and to figure out what happened to the team member who didn't die, but went missing. My problem with this premise is that this is a world where AI is advanced and in charge of everything and has little regard for humans. If this is the case, why are humans, slow of thought, and uninventive, sent to fight it? Why not robots? Why not hackers?
I thought of this particularly when the two characters from the first chapter, who are trying to persuade a resentful set of ex-team members to regroup, try to recruit the one who was their driver. Why do they have a human driver? Or pilot, or whatever she is? Even now we're having road vehicles enhanced by the use of computer-made decisions. Airplanes have had a lot of this technology for years. Now these people, purportedly in the future, want to take a backward step and have a slower-thinking human as their getaway driver? It made no sense and betrayed the whole world that the author had built. Naturally you want the human element in this, but these women really didn't feel human to me, and they weren't anyone I was interested in reading any more about. I didn't care about them, what they did, or what happened to them. But if you're going that route, you can write a better story about them and why they're needed instead of AIs. This story didn't do that.
The story of the girls was interleaved with another story, about this AI machine which was interested in working for a larger AI. I may be completely wrong about this, but it seemed obvious to me that this little AI was actually the missing team member who the others were searching for. Again, it didn't stir my interest, and if this is what turned out to the be case (I have no idea if it was), it was not interesting to me, since it had been telegraphed leaving no surprises. These assorted problems I perceived in the plot and the writing style were why I DNF'd this one. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent or so that I skimmed/read.
