Hunter Kuffel's Reviews > All This & More

I really enjoyed Shepherd's previous book, The Cartographers, and I feel compelled to say that writing a book is super hard and an achievement no matter what. That said, boy oh boy, no part of this worked for me whatsoever. The only reason I finished it was so I could feel wholly justified in ranting about everything I disliked.

In broad strokes, I found it to be poorly constructed, extremely confusing (not in the way it seems was intended), and filled with extremely wooden characters who rarely if ever rose above the most lowest-common-denominator stereotypes of the role they played in the story.

For context, the book is structured like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so depending on the choices you want the MC to make, you might not read every page linearly. Either as a result of that, or just in an unfortunate coincidence, the narrative was exhaustingly repetitive, with no organic build toward a conclusion.

(mildish spoilers but just keep reading bc don't read this book. Actual spoilers are tagged)

Marsh, the protagonist, did not hold together as a character. The reader is led to believe that she grows to become this uber-competent rockstar over the course of the narrative, but simultaneously needs to be beaten over the head ceaselessly with signs that all isn't as it seems for 80% of the book before she decides to do anything about it. Her inner thoughts and decisions seem almost wholly dependent on what the next scene requires, which is especially annoying when the whole conceit of the novel is that she can bend her life to her will through her choices.

For much of the book, Marsh is employed as a lawyer or adjacent to the legal industry, and the book doesn't remotely care about how a law firm would actually function beyond the most inane "everyone can't stop talking about your big case!" style drivel. I could let this slide if it didn't behave the same way about every job in the book, from software to tv production to journalism. I think there's an effective way to yada-yada real world things that you want in your book but don't want to spend too much time on, but this was not it.

Much of the narrative involves Marsh dropping into different permutations of her life and trying to slyly get up to speed on what's different and what's the same, and while this has the potential to be fun and display Marsh as canny and capable, what actually happened is that other characters are constantly exposition dumping in their dialog and not talking like a real person who doesn't know they're in a tv show. A couple examples:
- "With these shots, you’re going to be the star of the annual international wildlife conservation gala tomorrow!”
- “I’m surprised you’re here,” he says. “I thought you had a meeting about that big client Victor’s been talking about all week.” “Big client.” She nods at last. “Of course.”

(view spoiler)[
More on the Marsh front, it was so frustrating for so much of the middle of the book to watch her enter a new situation, see some through-line like Chrysalis or Dylan's briefcase or whatever, have the exact same reaction as she's already had three times (often with annoyingly similar language, like how it "stopped her cold"), resolve that she has to talk with Talia about it, tell Talia some vague bullshit like "something feels off", then be instantly mollified when Talia says some anodyne bit of generic reassurance.

Marsh was so incredibly passive throughout the whole Chrysalis storyline that it was really hard to buy her growth in the other aspects of the story. And not only passive, but very convinced that she would be able to overcome it with a strategy of "try the same thing I just tried, but in Mexico". Up until the final reveal (and honestly even after), her thinking w/r/t to Chrysalis was at best opaque and at worst actively stupid.

I also didn't jive with how the Chrysalis narrative flowed whatsoever. It didn't at all seem to me like an organic thing that started off as easter eggs and grew to be more prominent or sinister. It just seemed like butterflies or the word chrysalis were consistently in the perimeter of the story (a la Bad Wolf in Doctor Who), and Marsh just reacted differently depending on how close we were to the end of the book.

Ezra as a character made no sense, especially his communication with Marsh through the live chat in the show. Multiple times his messages were cut off mid-word, like he was speaking aloud and getting interrupted, but THAT'S NOT HOW TYPING A MESSAGE ON A COMPUTER WORKS. It was literally the Monty Python and the Holy Grail Castle of Aughhhh bit.

The live chat overall was just so freaking stupid. Don't tell me that there are thousands of messages streaming through Marsh's frame of view PER SECOND, then also describe back and forth conversations taking place in the chat. Just think about how it would actually work for two seconds. Also don't introduce TopFan01 as a moderator then later have them asking "Mods, is there a way we can ban this person more permanently?"

Other annoying bits:
- Whenever Talia showed up, we seemed to alternate between other people recognizing her as apparently the most famous human being on Earth, and everyone just accepting that she was like a flight attendant or whatever. Never explained, no consistency.
- we're not gonna put Ren in prison forever for creating a situation in which dozens of people were held captive and basically brainwashed for years against their will??????? And Marsh is still going to consider spending the rest of her life with him because she had a cool office??????? Alright.
(hide spoiler)]

I could go on, but suffice to say this book really frustrated me, especially because I think the central conceit and skeleton of the plot was quite cool. The execution was just awful, imo.