Liz's Reviews > Steelheart

I am not quite sure I understand why this book has such a high rating. It was just not my cup of tea, so much is obvious.
I found the writing rather poor, it felt taken fom a poorly conceived superhero comic. While I can appreciate superhero comics, if the art is appealing, the plot is more or less logical and it's not too stereotypical or stupid, I do not wish to see such a writing in a book. Because there is a huge difference between comics and books when it comes to narration, character development, character depth and so on and so forth. This type of writing displeased me.
And another small remark - the idiotic choice of curse words. I do understand when some authors try to avoid foul language for whatever reason, although I do think it is rather stupid since all of us curse. But exchanging the usual "offensive" language with some shit like Sparks and Slontze?



Either be creative or just keep the good old, okay? It irritated me so much! I can totally handle a lot of 'fucks' and rude, offensive phrases, but the language the characters of this book used sounded fucking retarded.
Another "pleasant" addition to the already amazing cocktail was the dialogue. Too much explaining, not nearly enough showing which deprived the reader of the jaw-dropping moments and generally too much talking and not enough action. When the action happened it couldn't be saved anymore. It's a superhero book for f* sake, who wants endless ramblings?

As for the characters. They were shallow, one-dimensional and unrelatable to me. Oh, and David was annoying. As was his lusting after Megan. Another typical comic book thing, but undesirable in an actual books that you maybe, eventually would like to take seriously.
The characters were awfully cliché. Take David's lusting after Megan as an example. What he focused on was describing her clothes, how revealing they were, how hot she looked etc. I couldn't take him serious after that, and it happened on the first 50 pages. David was somewhat like this - "Yeah, I want revenge, I'll do anything to get revenge...Oh fuck, she's hot. What was I saying?"



It was obviously written for male rather than female readers, with the excessive descriptions of weaponry, epic explosions and predominantly male characters.
Though, okay, I take the argument about the weaponry back because I wouldn't h lave complained if David had described swords, daggers and different kinds of bows instead of machine guns.
But the lack of female characters and their insignificance kind of annoyed me. Apart from Megan, whose main purpose for over half of the book was to confuse David, there was only Tia and she wasike a grey mouse somewhere in the background. Not cool. And I doubt it that 95% of the Epics are male or that...Really though, where did all the women go in this book? Odd. Not even annoying or bothersome anymore, just odd.

Lastly, I found it very predictable. The big revelation, the surprising and shocking moments were not shocking to me, instead I was just nodding to myself and reading on. Completely impassive.
The perfect hero, his hot love interest, the cliché Evil guys versus the Good ones, the exaggerated, completely brainless action scenes seemed laughable to me after about half of the book.
I am not fond of cliched literature. Never have been.

You can find similar superhero elements, but with a more sophisticated writing, actual, balanced action and dialogue and wonderfully conceived characters in books like Vicious.

Do I recommend this one?



If you cherish your brain cells you better avoid this book.