Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My wife and I enjoyed this book enough to pick up the sequel. The snappy dialogue and narration of the independent-minded heroine is a big plus here. The setting is creative. The plot is well-formed.
On the negative side, I thought there were too many words; too much exposition. To be fair, there’s a lot in this world to be explained — but I kept thinking, man, if I were doing this, I would’ve just left that sentence out, because we can already see that based on the dialogue. Or, the information in this paragraph could easily have been condensed to a couple of sentences, and see, there’s a character who needed that explained to them anyway, so it didn’t need to be done in narration. The narrative voice is pleasing, so that’s not a fatal flaw, but it did make things drag just a little, for me. Might just be my inability to turn off writer mode. The fact that we were reading aloud to each other on a car trip might’ve also had something to do with it.