I'm having trouble stomaching it's sychophantic attitude to Google's, blunt references to geek culture and the whole thing just feels like it was written for kids. One line that stood out as particular bad was "now I'm in a hot girl wizards bedroom and I'm sitting on her bed"
And I looked online, and it's universally praised, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
by over_jumpman
19 Comments
It’s terrible; you’re not alone.
I thought it was average. I read it almost five years ago and remember almost nothing about it. Something about a secret basement? That’s all I got.
I knew I’d fucked up when the protagonist’s friend got rich from designing groundbreaking video game boob technology.
I thought it was pretty meh. I think some reviewers liked it because it has this nostalgic whimsy about books in print form that they found appealing.
I originally heard it on the ‘Escape Pod’ podcast as a short story. The expansion of the short story into a novel felt forced and convoluted. It should of just been left as a short story.
I only finished it because I’d checked out the audio edition from my library to listen to on a long car trip. This was a few years ago, so all I remember really was excessive stuff about google, a possibly interesting secret book society that leads to an okay suspense/mystery plot, and infuriating doses of cringe-inducing, juvenile, male gaze re: hot girl geeks.
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MILD SPOILER:
And the whole typeface bit seemed ill-researched to me.
Read it, hated it, thought it was overrated and annoying. So, nope, you’re not alone.
I loved it!!!
Couldn’t make it past page fifty. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve read, but it was irritating.
The only thing I liked about the book was the glow in the dark cover.
It’s probably the worst book I’ve finished in the last twenty years. I tend to put bad books down quickly, so it somehow managed to keep my interest all the way through, but I don’t remember liking much of anything about it after the opening. It was like a more tolerable version of *Ready Player One*.
So yeah I didn’t like it but you know what kind of annoyed me? The fact that >!Google and all the king’s men could not figure out what seemed like a not very complex code!<
This subreddit (and the internet in general) has quite the penchant for exaggeration. Everything is the GREATEST or the ABSOLUTE WORST.
This book was a totally average YA story, complete with awkward prose and some sophomoric attitudes toward women and held above water by an interesting premise. Not great. Not terrible. I listened on a road trip and it was a decent way to pass the time, and I haven’t thought about it since.
Oh god, yes. I was so freaking excited when I started that book and it went downhill really fast. Every issue the MC had was solved by a friend within 10 pages. Seriously, seriously lazy plotting.
Yeah it was pretty awful. I had such high expectations for it but it fell so short. The Google thing was just bizarre.
I gave it quite a pass because it was my first experience reading contemporary Young Adult fiction. So I expected it to be light and it was, reading a lot like a video game.
But even so, as a bookworm I loved the idea of this strange bookstore and the sort of quest that the story evolved into.
Wait, why are people here calling it YA. Was it marketed as such at some point? I only ever saw it marketed as adult literary fiction.
(Also, I have read plenty of mediocre YA, and this was worse by my standards.)
Came here to see if anyone agreed that it was a bad book, good to see i am not alone.
I think one thing that ruined it for me was “Fantasy for the Google generation” i kept waiting for something supernatural to happen and then it never did…
I’m listening to it. Good narrator. But I’m really getting impatient. Could somebody tell how it comes out?