Teddy Hoffman

The characters were utterly un-memorable and you could have swapped each roll they played in the narrative and never noticed. Each character’s backstories felt as though they were apart of a checklist that had to filled out vs something that was apart of their lives. These backstories where never naturally brought up, but rather the hand of the author introducing them. Each character failed to exist beyond what was on paper leaving them little more than hastily painted 2d cutouts. The dialogue was stilted and generic vs an individual speaking. There was no sense of “this is a real person talking.” Everything zipped about from moment to moment to moment with no sense of pacing. Every big moment/reveal was given as much time as any other moment, leaving everything to feel samey. The timeline - particularly in the beginning of the book - had me often pausing and asking myself, “wait was there enough time for this?” I went back and forth through the book trying to make sense of said timeline instead of being pulled along. Despite traveling across the stars, and interacting with all kinds of new things, with all kinds of cultures, and over 800 pages there probably should have been a sense place and location. Instead everywhere and each culture felt the same minus the names slapped in front. I could go on for hours, but I would like to do other things and read a book that doesn’t leaving me feeling like I read several hundred pages of empty space - so I’m ending here.