Edit: I think a large part of the dialogue issues I complained about are due to poor translation from Russian. As I just realized this author is from Russia. I mean, I still stand by everything I said, but some of it makes a bit more sense now.
In some ways it’s a good book. In others it’s not. The story telling is decent and the concept is good. The pacing is well executed as well. Except the first few chapters which feel like you’re on a roller coster ride in the dark. One second everything is normal and then nothing really makes sense for about a chapter. I don’t know if it was deliberate, or merely that the author had never written a book before this.
But the main issue I have lies in the dialogue. It’s like the author has never held a conversation sometimes. Especially when it comes to his female characters, which come across as completely unbelievable.
Then there is the narrator, who is actually a decent narrator 90% of the time. But the other ten percent it’s like he just stopped taking the story serious. The vocal inflections in some scenes are just out of place and I almost feel like he is trying to cover up how badly a scene is written by over compensating with vocal tone. It’s extremely off putting when he shifts from a normal conversational tone to sounding like a character on SNL. I have been tempted repeatedly to pull up the book on kindle and see if the author just added a bunch of exclamation points that didn’t need to be there and this was how the narrator decided to interpreted the scene.
I gave it 4/5 stars because it’s really not a bad book. It’s just a book that could have been better if a bit more work was put into it.