Sci-Fi & Scary

Dwelling is not a comfortable book to read. Jonathan, the character with PTSD, is written really well. The thoughts that he has about suicide… honestly, does anyone with PTSD not think about suicide frequently at times? From personal experience, I’d say no. Anyways, his pieces are definitely the most realistic and gripping, but not what I would call ‘entertaining’. I think for the same reason I avoid memoirs and stuff. I don’t need to read about real life issues! However, the realistic solemnness of Jonathan’s issues are pushed to the background by some of the more unusual things the other members of the Suicide Squad are going through.

At the halfway point in the book, I felt like it still hadn’t gelled for me. Yes, I’d been introduced to the main characters, and I knew it was definitely building to something, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel like the throwbacks to the Augustus character were necessary, as we were already following a few viewpoints to begin with. Still, I hung in there because while it still hadn’t totally hooked me, it’s not like I wanted to walk away from the story either. There were occasional flashes of brilliant writing that swept you into the scene, especially in the beginning.

Finally, around the last quarter of the book, it looked like things were really starting to come together, and you knew that the author was finally getting to the good stuff. Unfortunately, it’s the last quarter of the book and the author is just now getting to the good stuff. That’s a little too much (more than a little, actually) time spent on set-up and character establishment. It definitely needs tightened up a bit, and some of the repetition done away with. And, I’m sad to report, the author never actually gets to the good stuff.

It feels like the entire book was one gigantic build up with absolutely no satisfactory climax. On one hand, I was really dissatisfied with it because I felt like with all the build-up, he had to be taking it somewhere awesome, but on the other hand it didn’t leave me screaming at the book about how cliffhangers were evil. So… it is what it is, and it’s not terrible, but it’s not nearly what it could have been.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book free from the author in exchange for an honest review.