Ben Saufley

Entertaining. Just about everything I expected from it. My wife and I had the mystery roughly figured out from maybe the midway point, maybe a bit before that, but I can say we were never confident that we were correct, which is just about all you can ask of this type of thing.

We were listening to it on Audible, which has four different voice actors for the four main characters, and we constantly had to pause to sort out which character was which. It was a while into the book before I realized I was confusing two or three of the dudes, and for a while I was forgetting which one had said which earlier on. I think that's just... high school drama, right? The names all blend together when you're hearing it secondhand.

Pretty fun. Listened to most of it on audio. Something about the cover, and the way it had been presented, had led me to believe that this book was as bit more, I don't know, literary? It's not. It's a fun science fiction adventure, and that's about it. The language is plain, the characters are secondary to the adventure. It's a nerd fantasy in the extreme, and sometimes that sort of takes you out of it a bit. But I am still a pretty big nerd. So I mostly enjoyed it, and now I'm moving on with my day.

Solid. Second half much more interesting than the first half. A lot of tangential information seemed to slow the book down at times. And I hate, hate, hate, reading, seeing, thinking about crimes of the sort that were committed in this book. So... I'm glad I'm done with it.

That said, I'm going to have to see the movie. I can probably get through the awful parts. And if so, I bet the rest will be a hell of a lot of fun. The book at least lays the groundwork for that.