Russell Zimmerman

My biggest problems with this book were first, the pretentious badassery that sounded just childish to me. This might have been partially due to the over-the-top audiobook narration. The narrator overemphasizes every brutal and/or visceral detail like he is desperately trying to convince the audience of extreme badassery. It sounds like a kid that is role-playing his favorite superhero but with the voice of a grown-ass man trying to sound like batman. It's a real shame because the narrator is clearly talented and capable and has a wonderful narration voice too. I guess it's a classic case of the narration amplifying a problem in the writing.

Second, the constant blunt and repetitive foreshadowing one-liners that do nothing beyond sounding ominous like in TV shows that want to keep your attention beyond the next ad break. This is a BOOK. The next chapter isn't behind an ad break. This is something I see everywhere. Authors just imitate TV show writing without understanding its purpose.

Third, there are a few very awkward exposition segments where a character describes what happened to them. But it's written like a present-tense first-person narration of that character's perspective, not like a spoken account of it. It's clearly an attempt at a more dramatic delivery which utterly fails because people just don't talk like that. It's just immersion-breaking instead of riveting.

I am honestly very tired of the general "everyone is blatantly racist" theme. Yes, we know, racism is bad. But if you try to write a book that addresses this how about at least a tiny bit more nuance?
No book will convince a hard-core raging racist to change his mind and circle-jerking about how much more enlightened we are by not being disgusting racists has gotten old decades ago and is honestly kind of pathetic. If the only thing you can praise yourself for is not being racist what the hell are you doing with your life?
And if the only point of the racism is to have bad guys the audience can hate then I call that lazy, one-dimensional, and just utterly shallow. Complex and layered antagonists are at least as important as complex protagonists! And I get that this is not going to be the deepest of books with its 120 pages. But I think defining characters as more than "a racist" is not asking for too much.
Maybe I am too harsh on just 120 pages but I just really hate the racist trope in futuristic settings. I choose to believe that viewpoints like that will become rarer instead of more common in the future as has continuously been the case since the abolishment of US black slavery in the 19th century.

After all that negativity, I want to say that I generally enjoyed the book. I liked the main character and his magic companion. I kind of expected yet another dresden files imitation but that is not at all the case. It's more about people with hard lives still trying to make Good choices at the fringes of society and the law which I appreciate.… (mehr)