Martha Carr

In short, unoriginal and clichée.
The world is actually pretty unique even though it is built from common UF components but the plot and the character are clichée ridden caricatures of real people.
Additionally, we have lots of writing sins here.
If you make your mc competent you have to stick to that competence. Plot convenient brain farts and other out of the blue stupid decisions are just cheap.
Many conversations seem unnatural because everything is exaggerated and caricature-like.
Every one of the many villains is so cartoon-like I couldn't take any of them serious.
The battle scenes seemed to be round-based like in the older final fantasy games.
Furthermore, the MC is constantly and suddenly TSTL, typically mid-battle, just as a plot device to increase the drama and tension.
And lets not even talk about the constant blatant virtue signalling.… (meer)

A lot of effort went into consistent worldbuilding but common sense was nowhere to be found in the actual writing.
It was scattered and all over the place.
The attempts at humor went by me entirely.
The incompetence and sheer stupidity of all parties involved in the plot is staggering.
The plot is full of huge false leaps in logic that make sense from the perspective of an all-knowing observer but the information the individual characters have is not properly taken into account.
The entire setup requires an entire zoo of ridiculous plot conveniences.
All characters seemed very two-dimensional to me.

Many of the characters' motivations make no logical sense to me. Most of it is only motivated by what the author needs people to do for the plot to unravel as planned. The emotional involvement of characters is being switched off and on which makes them feel false.

The book has the tendency to overexplain individual parts of the worldbuilding in excruciating detail. It very much seems like the author is so proud of the worldbuilding she can't stop sharing every detail she thought up.
If you invested a lot of time into consistent worldbuilding the readers will notice even without putting any emphasis on it at all. It just fundamentally feels different. But oversharing all that worldbuilding just kills the pacing.

All these points don't do the weird feeling I had the entire time I read this book justice. I can't put my finger on what exactly was so weird about this book. It was just disorienting.
I should mention I read book zero but it so seamlessly connects to book one I'll just treat them as one. So this scattered feeling wasn't because I missed worldbuilding in the first first book.
… (meer)

In one word, shallow.

Lots really bad cyber-hacker talk that clearly shows that the author has not the slightest clue what she is talking about which really kills the mood because it's a major part of the story and because it's not the typical hacker-dude friend but the MC herself.
There are quite a few competent people that can read over your stuff and correct these sections in a way that the terms at least slightly resemble legit IT-terminology. I am willing to do so! Send me your sections of hacker jargon and I'll correct the terminology or even try to invent a plausible scenario that fills the plot-device requirements.

Beyond that, the book starts off with waxing about destiny and prophecy which I personally dislike because it doesn't add anything to a story in most cases.

I would need to write a huge review describing all the individual scenes and how they felt shallow or unnatural to communicate what the big general problem is because I am unable to put the crux of the flaw into words, but I don't think that would be interesting to read.
I guess the best I can do is to say it feels shallow in the way a lot of bad YA feels shallow. Not some specific character or aspect or something. Just everything seems shallow. And there are a lot of bad clichées some of which were quite corny.

I do not recommend it.

ps: I kind of want to give it 1 star but that would put it together with the shit I flung from me in disgust which would be unfair. There is nothing particularly infuriating to me in this book. There is just not a single aspect that redeems its many flaws.… (meer)