DNF @ Page 230

I might come back to this later. Admittedly I'm not really into the superhero stuff, but I thought the villain's perspective was interesting. And it had it's funny moments as well. ( )

I don't remember why I picked up this book initially, but I do know that one reason it stayed on my TBR was because Seanan McGuire blurbed it. Given how much I love McGuire's superhero stories (the Velveteen Vs. series) I figured this one should be a no-brainer. And ultimately, it was. There were a few stumbling blocks on the way to my enjoyment of the book, but by the end I was hooked and curious where the story goes.

Narrator Alex McKenna was good, but the audiobook didn't work for me: I couldn't skim or skip the descriptions of the injuries. Body horror is not among my preferred reading themes, and the injuries described often came close enough to hit me the same way. I much prefer being able to read this text at my own pace, and being able to skim the parts that are close to body horror. I'm not going to go into CW details for it, but just be aware that if you are squeamish when it comes to injuries or body mods, this might not be the book for you, especially the final confrontation. (Or at the very least, pick a format where you can skim the parts you don't want to focus on.)

Another issue I had with the book was the lack of dialogue tags. This is often a minor thing in books, but for this one there were times when there were gatherings or meetings and lots of people talking and very few indications of who was saying what. Most of the characters weren't developed enough as personalities before this for me to pick up on who was speaking without the dialogue tags. While these conversations might have helped to develop the personalities if I knew who was speaking, since I didn't they ended up just being confusing. (Sometimes funny, but still confusing.)

Also, it seems petty, but it bugged me that there were a lot of cases where a question was ended with a period. I still knew it was a question, and it may have been an intentional decision to make the question sound more flat and demanding, but I didn't like it.

However, none of that should by any means diminish the fact that I liked the book as a whole. Once I figured out why the audiobook wasn't working for me, I zipped through the ebook. I love the premise of it: a temp worker getting injured and researching how much damage the heroes do in the name of the greater good. I actually surprised myself by mostly liking the main character Anna as well, even as she began her villainous origin story and made choices I disagree with. Many of the side characters have great potential and were fun to read about.

The pace is slower at the beginning and (much) faster near the end, but the whole book flows together well and presents a solid picture for this alternate universe where superheroes and supervillains destroy the lives of everyday people in their conflicts. I did prefer the beginning of the book, where Anna was a temp and getting by on the fringes, and I missed the interactions she had at the beginning of the story that were missing at the end (I can't say more, because spoilers) but I did end up enjoying the whole thing. ( )

Great, great, great. I loved this book and these characters. So much depth and thoughtfulness in each one. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Alex McKenna. Her narration was easy enough to follow, but her character voices were too cartoonish for my tastes. Since this is a superhero/villain type story, that might have been an intentional choice and/or a choice that others would appreciate. It’s not a style I like, though. Aside from that, I don’t have any particular complaints.

Story
This is kind of a subverted superhero story. In that respect, it reminded me of the graphic novel Watchmen which is the only other story along those lines I can remember encountering. The setting is an alternate version of earth where there are both superheroes and supervillains with special powers. The story focuses on Anna, a “hench”. A hench is a normal person who chooses to do the grunt work for supervillains. These henches are often hired out through temp agencies. Anna is basically a data analyst. She starts crunching numbers and finds that superheroes do an enormous amount of damage both to property and people in the process of their “heroic” actions.

I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, although the second half has more action. I mostly liked reading about Anna, but I didn’t always like her choices and I often found her to be hypocritical. To a large extent this is a revenge story, and I’m not usually a big fan of those. I couldn’t always get behind her decisions or her motivations, and even less so for some of the other character. It was pretty melodramatic at times, and some things didn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess that’s a superhero story for you. One of the more mundane aspects I had trouble with was the idea that Anna was placed in charge when Leviathan was kidnapped, even though she really shouldn’t have had the experience or the expertise to be a logical choice by that point.

There was at least one part of this book that was super gory. Honestly it was so over the top that I couldn’t take it seriously or even really be horrified by it, but it went on and on and on. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t like gore in their reading material.

The main story comes to a conclusion, but there are several threads left unanswered and the end of the story is a pretty clear lead into the next book. The writing was ok and the story held my interest, but I didn’t enjoy this enough to want to continue the series. I might have appreciated this more if I were a bigger fan of the superhero subgenre. ( )

I'll start by saying how aweful the cover if this book is. The thing does little justice to the content!
There's a lot to like about the story. Not too much time wasted on world-building and all but i wish a bit more was told about other important characters. Like the girl, on the Auditor's team, that was used to mess with Accelerator.
Quantum Entanglement too, very little room for her!
Other than that, i can be counted among those waiting for a sequel. ( )