Brian S

Far too much navel-gazing. I honestly skipped full pages at a time, when the main character was simply spinning his wheels in the “woe-is-me” morass. The main character wasn't interesting. A simple people-pleaser tied to a narcissistic boss.

I don't care about either of them. I could not be bothered to like either of them. The motives of the boss are at least understandable, if cookie-cutter. The main character... well, so wishy-washy as to be pointless. And by the end of the book, he hadn't changed or grown, even a little bit.

You can skip just about 80% of the written words in this novel, and still follow the story. The author uses far far far too much descriptive text, and annoyingly long and repetitive introspective passages.

The plot, when you get to it, is a good one. But most authors would have condensed this entire novel into a handful of chapters.

The kernel of an interesting story surrounded by far too much navel-gazing.

Good story. Needs professional editor.

As always, the story is entertaining. Unfortunately, the sheer quantity of grammatical, spelling, and editing errors drag it down. Nearly every page of this book is littered with at least one error. Sometimes a character has their name spelled differently. Often the author confuses “there” and “their”, “too”, “to”, and “two”. Sentence structures often break, leaving the reader to backtrack to understand what the author was trying to say. Missing words, or words entirely wrong for a particular turn of phrase, confuse the reader.

Simply put, if just one experienced editor took a pass at this book, it would be significantly (and easily) improved.

I find all the 5-star reviews for The Artifact to be highly suspect. This is, quite simply, the most poorly written novel I have ever read.

How bad is the writing? Think of as many examples of poor writing as you can. I'll wait.

That's not enough. Think of more.

The author has exhibited every one of those. Repeatedly.

An example:
Most of the book is written in the first-person. At one point, the author forgot that they were writing from that perspective, between sentences in a conversation, making it appear as though the protagonist is talking to himself.

There are so many instances of near non-sequitors driving the plot. Middle of a conversation, suddenly they're talking about and doing something else.

The characters are paper-thin. There is no conflict. Even during potential genocide, they just go with the flow. Stuff happens, and they just move on to the next conversation.

I have to imagine the protagonist is an avatar of the author. If I had to guess, judging by the protagonist's interaction and the author's use of female characters, the author had never had a girlfriend, or even a close female friend. The author has probably never had a job. The author has probably never met anyone in the government or military.

Simply put, it just seems like the author has no life experience, no ability to imagine it, and has done no research to fill in any knowledge gaps.

There's an idea for a fun story. But the author doesn't have the chops to tell it.