dtaylorbooks's review
2.0
How did we end up here?
This was part of my Curiosity Quills binge-receive from the beginning of the year that they sent over. Just working through the pile.
Okay, book. You've got 50 pages. Go!
The opening started out interesting enough. I mean, how are dead bodies not interesting? But then the story started to fracture and go off in its own subplots that left the spine of the story, this whole god particle aspect, really in the dust. I actually almost set it down for good but that moment came right when the decedents’ will came into play and I had to stick around to find out what happened with that. So it worked in hooking me back in but I wasn’t exactly bursting with joy about it. I just wanted to see where it all ended up.
What worked . . .
There was definitely a lot of drama going on that just made it entertaining to read since every character was a train wreck. And the scientific aspect of it was interesting, at least the theory part about how this machine that Ricardo’s friends created could beam then into another dimension and what ended up getting left behind was a bodily residue that stopped worked after two weeks, making it look like bodies were piling up.
So yeah, the hot Maury messes and the pseudo-science fiction kept me going.
What didn't work . . .
The story was really disjointed and there were a lot of crazy ass people who needed to be kept track of whose intrusions into the plot were rather useless at best. And they all said Ricardo’s name way too often. It got annoying. And Ricardo found himself falling in love with every non-lesiban woman who was involved with this incident so by the time he was “really in love” I didn’t buy it. Really, the characters were just . . . blech. Talk show-level dysfunction that was entertaining in short bursts but anything longer than that would have me walking away.
Ricardo’s job also had a tendency of changing up throughout the book. He started off being a catastrophe modeler for a mega-insurance company thinly disguised as IAG but he was also an actuary and by the end of the book his job was something a smarter-than-average accounting clerk could do. Cat modeling and actuarial work are similar but the former is very specific and wouldn’t require Ricardo to know ridiculous minutiae about cop death rates and people crossing the street or whatever that would otherwise be involved in an actuary’s life who sets rates on products that actually involve those things (municipal worker’s comp, life and health insurance, etc.). Cat modeling is focused on things like earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. You know, catastrophic things. And I assure you, if all you needed to be was a smart accounting clerk in order to be an actuary EVERYONE WOULD BE AN ACTUARY. There’s a reason why those people make the money they do and it’s not because it’s something any schmo can do. And the fact that Ricardo was a fully licensed actuary with all the requisite testing behind him and in a position in a company like that with his own office by the age of 30 is a bit of a stretch. I work with actuaries every day. It takes a LONG time to become an actuary. A long time.
There was just way too much going on in these people’s personal lives and Ricardo was reading way too many of his father’s stories whose plots actually bled into the story and it just all detracted from the plot of this god particle. Seriously, when Ricardo was reading his fathers books (which were parallels of his life, he couldn’t get the hint otherwise, it would seem) the story would deviate to tell the tale of whatever it was he was reading. For pages. Talk about a detraction from the plot. The machine and his dead friends ended up becoming this annoyance in Ricardo’s life that was better handled by the NSA and other government entities while he loved his way through women. I wanted to stay on track with the machine but the story didn’t.
And in the end . . .
At least it went out on a high note. Too bad the rest of the story wasn’t as focused and in-your-face interesting. It really needed to be reigned in and I wanted to like it more than what I did but it was too scatter-brained for me to focus on it for any length of time. And the typos were kind of annoying, mainly missing words that my brain automatically filled in because it wouldn’t accept such poorly structured sentences. I’m less than impressed with this one. It had the potential to be a good story but it got lost in itself. It kept finding its way back every once in a while but pubic hair and boners and random stories written by Ricardo’s dad kept getting in the way.
This was part of my Curiosity Quills binge-receive from the beginning of the year that they sent over. Just working through the pile.
Okay, book. You've got 50 pages. Go!
The opening started out interesting enough. I mean, how are dead bodies not interesting? But then the story started to fracture and go off in its own subplots that left the spine of the story, this whole god particle aspect, really in the dust. I actually almost set it down for good but that moment came right when the decedents’ will came into play and I had to stick around to find out what happened with that. So it worked in hooking me back in but I wasn’t exactly bursting with joy about it. I just wanted to see where it all ended up.
What worked . . .
There was definitely a lot of drama going on that just made it entertaining to read since every character was a train wreck. And the scientific aspect of it was interesting, at least the theory part about how this machine that Ricardo’s friends created could beam then into another dimension and what ended up getting left behind was a bodily residue that stopped worked after two weeks, making it look like bodies were piling up.
So yeah, the hot Maury messes and the pseudo-science fiction kept me going.
What didn't work . . .
The story was really disjointed and there were a lot of crazy ass people who needed to be kept track of whose intrusions into the plot were rather useless at best. And they all said Ricardo’s name way too often. It got annoying. And Ricardo found himself falling in love with every non-lesiban woman who was involved with this incident so by the time he was “really in love” I didn’t buy it. Really, the characters were just . . . blech. Talk show-level dysfunction that was entertaining in short bursts but anything longer than that would have me walking away.
Ricardo’s job also had a tendency of changing up throughout the book. He started off being a catastrophe modeler for a mega-insurance company thinly disguised as IAG but he was also an actuary and by the end of the book his job was something a smarter-than-average accounting clerk could do. Cat modeling and actuarial work are similar but the former is very specific and wouldn’t require Ricardo to know ridiculous minutiae about cop death rates and people crossing the street or whatever that would otherwise be involved in an actuary’s life who sets rates on products that actually involve those things (municipal worker’s comp, life and health insurance, etc.). Cat modeling is focused on things like earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. You know, catastrophic things. And I assure you, if all you needed to be was a smart accounting clerk in order to be an actuary EVERYONE WOULD BE AN ACTUARY. There’s a reason why those people make the money they do and it’s not because it’s something any schmo can do. And the fact that Ricardo was a fully licensed actuary with all the requisite testing behind him and in a position in a company like that with his own office by the age of 30 is a bit of a stretch. I work with actuaries every day. It takes a LONG time to become an actuary. A long time.
There was just way too much going on in these people’s personal lives and Ricardo was reading way too many of his father’s stories whose plots actually bled into the story and it just all detracted from the plot of this god particle. Seriously, when Ricardo was reading his fathers books (which were parallels of his life, he couldn’t get the hint otherwise, it would seem) the story would deviate to tell the tale of whatever it was he was reading. For pages. Talk about a detraction from the plot. The machine and his dead friends ended up becoming this annoyance in Ricardo’s life that was better handled by the NSA and other government entities while he loved his way through women. I wanted to stay on track with the machine but the story didn’t.
And in the end . . .
At least it went out on a high note. Too bad the rest of the story wasn’t as focused and in-your-face interesting. It really needed to be reigned in and I wanted to like it more than what I did but it was too scatter-brained for me to focus on it for any length of time. And the typos were kind of annoying, mainly missing words that my brain automatically filled in because it wouldn’t accept such poorly structured sentences. I’m less than impressed with this one. It had the potential to be a good story but it got lost in itself. It kept finding its way back every once in a while but pubic hair and boners and random stories written by Ricardo’s dad kept getting in the way.
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