Sci-Fi & Scary

This book was a next to impossible read for me. It took multiple tries, and sheer determination for me to be able to finish reading it. I felt like I had to be at fault. Maybe I just wasn’t attempting to read it under the right circumstances or some such. Unfortunately, no matter when or how I set myself to read it, I still couldn’t enjoy the book on any level. The main character – Thomas – is a technophobe with a personality (and possible mental illness) that is off-putting. That made him very, very difficult to connect with on any level The other characters in the book are either unlikable or written in such a way that I still just could not care for any of them. Now, I’ve read books with characters I didn’t care for before and enjoyed them, but that was generally because the quality of the writing carried the story. That is not the case in Who You Work For.

The writing needs work. On one page – consisting of them leaving the porch, getting in the car, and moving a ridiculously short distance – two characters’ names are mentioned 7 times a piece. There’s no need for that, at all, and it makes the writing feel overly simple and completely dry and un-engaging. On another page, in one sentence the woman (who is asleep) has a ‘focused’ look on her face. Two sentences later, the author refers to it as a ‘careless’ look. Those two don’t generally go hand in hand. The author says the same thing multiple ways, spelling things out like the reader can’t be trusted to understand certain phrases. This is consistently done throughout the book, and makes reading it akin to pulling teeth at times. There’s also the tell-all letter writing prop and other issues that drag the story down.

While I sincerely admire anyone who has the guts to put their work out there for the world to see, I simply can’t recommend this book.

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