A review by meg_mazzaferro
Children of Icarus, by Caighlan Smith
1.0
I was not a fan of this book at all. It was somehow both incredibly boring and extremely disturbing at the same time. The main character is bland, boring, and useless, and every other character is horrible (and I don't mean horrible as in you do not like them, I mean they are all terrible people). I have never so actively rooted against a group of teens forced to survive in a harsh environment. The only reason I finished this novel was because I read it while I was on vacation, and had no other reading material on me.
While remaining spoiler free: the first act involves very little world building, and establishes almost nothing about the setting or society we are seeing. You learn very little about the culture or belief systems of these people, and the relationships that are supposed to impact the entire novel are very poorly established. The second act is first incredibly boring, with little happening for most of it. The main character is passive and all the things that do take place have absolutely no impact. The very end of the second act does get more exciting, but somehow the action and suspense is incredibly boring and predictable. The writing is dry and does little to engage the reader. The only time I was engaged was at a point where the writing left me incredibly disturbed (I am not a squeamish reader, and this is the only time a novel has ever made me so lingeringly uncomfortable, but I read this book a long time ago and still feel unsettled when I think about it). While the third act does pick up, and is a promising stepping off point for the sequel that the novel sets up, by the time I got to it I was already so disturbed and bored (a very unusual combination) that it could not redeem the overall novel.
While remaining spoiler free: the first act involves very little world building, and establishes almost nothing about the setting or society we are seeing. You learn very little about the culture or belief systems of these people, and the relationships that are supposed to impact the entire novel are very poorly established. The second act is first incredibly boring, with little happening for most of it. The main character is passive and all the things that do take place have absolutely no impact. The very end of the second act does get more exciting, but somehow the action and suspense is incredibly boring and predictable. The writing is dry and does little to engage the reader. The only time I was engaged was at a point where the writing left me incredibly disturbed (I am not a squeamish reader, and this is the only time a novel has ever made me so lingeringly uncomfortable, but I read this book a long time ago and still feel unsettled when I think about it). While the third act does pick up, and is a promising stepping off point for the sequel that the novel sets up, by the time I got to it I was already so disturbed and bored (a very unusual combination) that it could not redeem the overall novel.