Daniel Price

This was interesting and ambitious and very difficult to summarize. I am lazy, so I will not even attempt to do so. But I am 100% into reading all of the sequels, as they become available. Even though it is probably going to take a million years.

I had some stylistic quibbles, the biggest of which was the uneven racist terms. Like, Altamerica is even more xenophobic and insular, so the racism made sense within the context of the story. However, considering that there were several made-up terms (like dusker for brown/black folk and chinny for anyone who even looked remotely Asian) why the inclusion of oriental and negress? What is this, 1940? Especially since the person using negress was not even from Altamerica but Altengland? Reading those broke me out of the story and I just couldn't reconcile it. There were some bits that felt a little exotifying and less friendly to the women, especially regarding Melissa. She was basically a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, with a badge.

Overall, I was just really enthralled by it. It was like later seasons of Fringe, with a little X-Men and a couple other things that I can't name right now because I am not nearly caffeinated enough.… (meer)

I am super torn on how to rate this book. I am hovering somewhere between 2 and 3 stars.
Let's start with the good - I liked the writing style, though it changed throughout. I felt like it started off trying too hard before settling into something more readable. Though there was one sentence I did particularly like saying out loud: "Broadway bombast with a Bombay contrast." But I am glad the rest of the book didn't continue on that way.

The story was fascinating, and the sci-fi ideas were awesome. I love time travel, I loved how everyone's weird powers were described, the universe was really cool. I wish this book had been better because of these things. This is where I want to give 3 stars, but I just can't.

So there's Hannah, she's really hot. She is curvy and short and has just the loveliest boobs you'll ever read about. Her sister is tall and slim and also really good-looking. They're opposites, but they're both quite nice to look at. Don't worry if you forget, it'll come up again. Also, there is another girl character, she is a teenager and is fat. Or, she just thinks she's fat because teenagers amirite? The male gaze is very strong in this book. I found it very hard to push through it. Every female character's attractiveness is remarked on, either by the narrative voice or (and) by themselves or (and) at least one but usually more than one other character. Here's a fun one:

"In her prime, Olda Varnoc had been a knockout blonde of stunning proportions. Now her hair was gray as ash and her body stood a balloon-sculpture parody of its former self. Not that she cared. Her need for beauty had perished at age twenty, when a bad reversal rendered her infertile, unsuitable for marriage."

Now that is straight out of the Piers Anthony Guide to Writing Real Women! YES IT COULD BE ARGUED that this is just how this one particular woman views herself but there so much of this weird sexist BS scattered around this book that I doubt it. Some of the men are objectified like this too, but not to the same extent. David, one of the teenagers, is quite attractive though. Like really good-looking. Really hot. For a teen.

Here's another fun quote: "He shook a stern finger at Mia. 'I should've known better than to trust your self-description. I bought a whole mess of clothes for a fat girl. They're gonna hang off you like drapes.'" I'm not sure if that was supposed to be funny or what.

Also there are four-ish characters of colour - this is explained away because AltAmerica is isolationist (I'm sure this will come up again in future books but in this book, everyone in the states is racist). One of the main crew is Philipino, one of the cops is black (and HER HAIR IS WEIRD this is again because of AltAmerican's isolationism), one of the antagonists is Indian, and also: "The willowy young woman was a daughter of the clan's last pure Asian family, though one could hardly tell from the excessive amount of mascara she wore." They must have some powerful, ethnicity-hiding mascara in AltAmerica!

And last but most definitely least, the MOST BORING ANTAGONIST OF ALL TIME. Some dude named Evan who can travel back in time and only uses this talent to torture Hannah across at least 54 lifetimes because she didn't have sex with him. I'm serious. She was nice to him once, and he thought that it meant she would have sex with him, but it didn't mean that, and now HE IS PISSED AND WILL NEVER STOP MAKING HER PAY. He's a terrible person, and a terrible character, and a terrible antagonist, and every time he showed up in a chapter I skimmed it because all he does is cause pain to innocent people and call Hannah a slut and I am just not down for that. He added nothing to the story at all for me.

So the reason I'm not giving this book one star is because I was mostly really into the story, I was having a great time following the gang on their adventure and all the plot twists and the cool sciency powers and the mysterious powerful beings and the really fascinating ideas and then one of the above quotes happened and I frowned at the book really hard.… (meer)

This was just ok.

It might have been good if it had slowed down for a few seconds, but instead, every page was a new crisis that was resolved by the next page. As a result, I felt the characters didn't really have time to develop or become people--they were too busy rushing around to keep the plot moving briskly.

And too much just didn't make sense.

Super-advanced future people visit the Earth to kill it so that they can kidnap six people who will then save a different Earth from the same fate? Can't you kidnap six people without slaughtering billions of them? Is there any point to this besides needlessly ratcheting up drama?

Why do they become superheroes on the new planet? The lack of any plausible (even in-story plausible) biological explanation made it feel very forced to me.

While I appreciated the Evan character very much (as a new style of villain), his neverending hate-on for Hannah also just felt like an attempt to ratchet up drama. It would have been a fast-paced enough read without his petulant grudge adding new crises every chapter or so.

Anyway, it was ok, but I'm glad I got it from the library.… (meer)