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A review by christymoyer
These Days by Jack Cheng
2.0
I wanted to love this book. Not only is Cheng an NYC local and a member of the tech community, he funded this novel—his first—on Kickstarter with a $10K goal. Had I known about the campaign before it ended, I probably would have donated, too—the plot was both fresh and intriguing.
But the book fell totally flat. Cheng read like a first-time author from the beginning. There were so many adjectives and adverbs worked into a single sentence—as if he had just passed the 4th grade lesson on descriptive writing ("...a frontal view of a handsome table topped with lightly faded oak standing on gently faded wooden legs." *cringe*). He also had a strange predilection for brand name-dropping. In one page he mentioned 12 brands, from Napster to Netflix. It was totally off-putting and weird, and felt like he was writing for a YA crowd that might value those references. Add in his flippant start-up buzzwords ("pivot", anyone??) and the reading experience felt like one giant eye-roll.
These nit-picky observations aside, the plot was anticlimactic and the characters had no chemistry to boot. I think Cheng felt a lot of pressure to prove his ability as a writer coming from a technical background, and in the process completely overcompensated—resulting in a book that felt sophomoric, boring and somehow pretentious all at once.
But the book fell totally flat. Cheng read like a first-time author from the beginning. There were so many adjectives and adverbs worked into a single sentence—as if he had just passed the 4th grade lesson on descriptive writing ("...a frontal view of a handsome table topped with lightly faded oak standing on gently faded wooden legs." *cringe*). He also had a strange predilection for brand name-dropping. In one page he mentioned 12 brands, from Napster to Netflix. It was totally off-putting and weird, and felt like he was writing for a YA crowd that might value those references. Add in his flippant start-up buzzwords ("pivot", anyone??) and the reading experience felt like one giant eye-roll.
These nit-picky observations aside, the plot was anticlimactic and the characters had no chemistry to boot. I think Cheng felt a lot of pressure to prove his ability as a writer coming from a technical background, and in the process completely overcompensated—resulting in a book that felt sophomoric, boring and somehow pretentious all at once.