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A review by bookph1le
Unbreakable by Elizabeth Norris
2.0
I don't know what it is about me lately. It's like I have extreme book discontent, and only a read here and there really gets me excited, like Andy Weir's The Martian, which I finished just before reading this book. Maybe that's part of the problem. I thought The Martian was so fresh, so well done, and so compulsively readable that this book didn't really have a fair chance. Spoilers to follow.
I remember liking the first book when I read it, but that was quite a while ago. While reading this one, I kept wondering what I'd liked so much about the first book. It's not that I disliked this book, it's that I found it average, and that didn't make sense to me because I remember feeling like the first one was more exciting and unique. While the concept is still intriguing to me--I mean, multiple universe? Come on! What's not inherently interesting about that possibility?--it didn't draw me in with this book as much as it did with the first. Maybe it's because the freshness of inter-universe hopping is gone, I don't know. It may also be because the story switches from being personal in the first book to feeling more like it's falling into a "crime of the week" groove with this second book. It's not that this is a bad thing, but it gives the story a different flavor and a different focus, and that didn't work as well for me.
One of my major issues with this book was that it does so much telling instead of showing, even when it doesn't need to. A lot of chapters end like this: "And then Barclay told me his master plan". On the one hand, the short chapters are good because they keep things crackling along, but on the other they're bad because oh the forced cliffhangers. So. Many. Forced. Cliffhangers. And instead of having, say, Barclay relay the information in his own words, instead Janelle ends up summarizing things. I don't get this. Why not do this through dialog? It's not a big difference, just a subtle change, really, but I think it would have given the book more impact. It wouldn't have given me the sense that I was reading lots of summarizing of big, important plot points. It would have kept me in the narrative more, given me a greater sense of immediacy, made me feel more like I was seeing the scene play out rather than reading Janelle's notes summing it up. It's like the difference between actually seeing a play and reading a synopsis of it. The synopsis may work for some people, but I prefer the live action.
Another problem I had with the book was the sense that things were playing out along a preset path. At no point did I worry about what was happening because I could clearly see there was a master plan playing out. It dispelled a lot of the tension and took away from my enjoyment of the story because I wasn't all that worried that something truly bad was going to happen. There's one event in particular where I immediately thought, "Oh, it's fine. She's wrong about that." Sure enough, she was wrong about it, and it robbed a huge amount of tension from the book. It's not that Norris shies away from having consequences to her stories. Both this book and the one before it had some serious consequences, including the deaths of prominent characters. But I didn't worry much about the really central players. The plot moves in such a linear fashion that I didn't need to worry. Sure, complications and plot twists happen, but they didn't feel organic to me.
My other beef was the weirdness between Barclay and Janelle. It felt like the book was setting up a love triangle, and I frankly hated that. I pretty much hate love triangles on principle, not because they're necessarily a bad plot device, but because so many authors misuse them. The love triangle in The Hunger Games doesn't bother me because I think it's also a literary device meant to reinforce Katniss's conflict between maintaining the status quo and choosing to take a stand. With this book, I didn't see the point. It also bothers me that so many books tend to automatically jump to animal attraction between male and female characters. Newsflash: men and women can be platonic. I have no patience for the insistence that they can't, and so it bugs me when books inevitably add sexual tension between male and female characters. What would shock me is a book that doesn't go there. Unbreakable is not that book.
Would I come back for another book in this series, if there is one? I don't know. I'm not completely unwilling to give it another chance, but there are so many books I want to read that I'm also reluctant to give more time to a series that's not really doing it for me. I guess we'll see what happens.
I remember liking the first book when I read it, but that was quite a while ago. While reading this one, I kept wondering what I'd liked so much about the first book. It's not that I disliked this book, it's that I found it average, and that didn't make sense to me because I remember feeling like the first one was more exciting and unique. While the concept is still intriguing to me--I mean, multiple universe? Come on! What's not inherently interesting about that possibility?--it didn't draw me in with this book as much as it did with the first. Maybe it's because the freshness of inter-universe hopping is gone, I don't know. It may also be because the story switches from being personal in the first book to feeling more like it's falling into a "crime of the week" groove with this second book. It's not that this is a bad thing, but it gives the story a different flavor and a different focus, and that didn't work as well for me.
One of my major issues with this book was that it does so much telling instead of showing, even when it doesn't need to. A lot of chapters end like this: "And then Barclay told me his master plan". On the one hand, the short chapters are good because they keep things crackling along, but on the other they're bad because oh the forced cliffhangers. So. Many. Forced. Cliffhangers. And instead of having, say, Barclay relay the information in his own words, instead Janelle ends up summarizing things. I don't get this. Why not do this through dialog? It's not a big difference, just a subtle change, really, but I think it would have given the book more impact. It wouldn't have given me the sense that I was reading lots of summarizing of big, important plot points. It would have kept me in the narrative more, given me a greater sense of immediacy, made me feel more like I was seeing the scene play out rather than reading Janelle's notes summing it up. It's like the difference between actually seeing a play and reading a synopsis of it. The synopsis may work for some people, but I prefer the live action.
Another problem I had with the book was the sense that things were playing out along a preset path. At no point did I worry about what was happening because I could clearly see there was a master plan playing out. It dispelled a lot of the tension and took away from my enjoyment of the story because I wasn't all that worried that something truly bad was going to happen. There's one event in particular where I immediately thought, "Oh, it's fine. She's wrong about that." Sure enough, she was wrong about it, and it robbed a huge amount of tension from the book. It's not that Norris shies away from having consequences to her stories. Both this book and the one before it had some serious consequences, including the deaths of prominent characters. But I didn't worry much about the really central players. The plot moves in such a linear fashion that I didn't need to worry. Sure, complications and plot twists happen, but they didn't feel organic to me.
My other beef was the weirdness between Barclay and Janelle. It felt like the book was setting up a love triangle, and I frankly hated that. I pretty much hate love triangles on principle, not because they're necessarily a bad plot device, but because so many authors misuse them. The love triangle in The Hunger Games doesn't bother me because I think it's also a literary device meant to reinforce Katniss's conflict between maintaining the status quo and choosing to take a stand. With this book, I didn't see the point. It also bothers me that so many books tend to automatically jump to animal attraction between male and female characters. Newsflash: men and women can be platonic. I have no patience for the insistence that they can't, and so it bugs me when books inevitably add sexual tension between male and female characters. What would shock me is a book that doesn't go there. Unbreakable is not that book.
Would I come back for another book in this series, if there is one? I don't know. I'm not completely unwilling to give it another chance, but there are so many books I want to read that I'm also reluctant to give more time to a series that's not really doing it for me. I guess we'll see what happens.