Raphael Leib

Meh. Premise is fun but hackneyed, characters are archetypes but mostly well-drawn, pacing is turgid and uneven, plot is predictable but barely there until close to the end. The book is at its best when it puts characters together in different combinations and lets them interact; it’s worst when it glides past major plot points without showing us what happened, only to reveal unsurprising bits and pieces in an overlong exposition dump a chapter or two later. This could be a far better book in the hands of a brutally honest editor, but there’s enough here that works that I’d give it a solid B.