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wintrygarden 's review for:
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom
by Jason Pargin
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I found so many of these characters just SO insufferable, unfortunately. Really cool premise, but the narrating characters were really unpleasant, and I struggle intensely with stories where there's not a grounding person involved in the plot who is pleasant and for whom I wish success, or a positive outcome. But for a book where you're mostly just listening to people talk to each other or about each other, the reading experience would have been vastly improved by the characters being even a bit less terrible or unpleasant.
Now, it feels like a tactical choice that these characters, who lean true to real people, were unpleasant. I understand what the goal was in the narrative, to tell stories about these types of real people and how they impact the world. But I struggled to find a lot of the unpleasantness to be purposeful in any real way. And that made it hard to stay engaged and want to follow through to the end of the mystery - which felt both satisfying and dissatisfying, mostly the latter. Hard to get through overall in a way I didn't expect.
Now, it feels like a tactical choice that these characters, who lean true to real people, were unpleasant. I understand what the goal was in the narrative, to tell stories about these types of real people and how they impact the world. But I struggled to find a lot of the unpleasantness to be purposeful in any real way. And that made it hard to stay engaged and want to follow through to the end of the mystery - which felt both satisfying and dissatisfying, mostly the latter. Hard to get through overall in a way I didn't expect.