Ian W. Sainsbury

This one just barely missed 3 stars for me.
It does something I always find incredibly frustrating where it has two POVs that switch back and forth each chapter but many of the chapters end on a tension-peak/cliffhanger.
I just don't understand why so many authors think this is necessary.
If your story is so dull that you feel you need a cliffhanger every other chapter for your readers not to abandon the book then you are doing something wrong. Instead of a cliffhanger how about you improve your chapter to be less boring so this bs becomes unnecessary?

Beyond that, it suffers from ill-defined power levels, especially towards the end.
This is something I don't always mind but this book initially seemed like the type of book that would communicate power levels very precisely but the strength of the superhuman aspects seem to shift around sometimes by multiple magnitudes depending on what is necessary to create tension.
There are quite a few much more obvious plot holes too that don't just suffer from vagueness.

My final big complaint is how the book never really defines any sort of goal. It begins with the MC going through a discovery phase of his new abilities. And I very much enjoy these kinds of stories in books and they don't really need a goal or a bad guy or anything of the sort. But then the author rather abruptly ends this chapter of the story and after that, it feels somewhat aimless.
There are interesting events but there is no interesting story and/or no interesting characters.
Neither of the two plot lines ultimately leads anywhere.

The only real plot is essentially just this generic evil secret government organization breeds super soldiers bs that was already unoriginal 30 years ago.
But it doesn't seem like this is what the book was meant to be about but in the end, it just didn't come up with anything more interesting than that.

This book had a lot of opportunities for greatness but it just missed all of them.… (más)

Good followup to a book that I was almost ambivalent about. This time around, there's much more meat to the story and the characters have been fleshed out enough that I can care enough about them. There's a plot twist near the very end that I found extremely groan-worthy and extraordinarily convenient (or perhaps it was telegraphed from the beginning and this only my sour grapes for not noticing it until then).

The audiobook narrator (Todd Boyce) did a good job with accents and voices, but as with the previous book, there's a couple of mis-pronunciations that seemed a little jarring:
Hyundai = "Hi-Yun-Day" instead of "Hun-day"
Samurai = "Sam-YOU-Rye" instead of "SAM-oo-rye"
Deja Vu = "Dezsh-uh-Vu" instead of "Day-zha-Vu"
747 (plane) = "Seven-Four-Seven" instead of "Seven Forty-Seven"

Granted, these are entirely picking at nits and could possibly be explained as a cultural difference.
… (más)