Leviathan Wakes

There's nothing that raises this book above average in every way - and more than its fair share of things that reduces it to well below average.

I do not like the characters. I find our two POV's to be insufferable and mostly interchangeable. (The only real difference between them is that Holden is holier-than-thou which also means I hate him the most.) The other three are very underdeveloped and we know little about them at the end of these five hundred plus pages that we didn't learn in the first hundred pages. (To be fair, Naomi or Amos might have been good MC's if they were given the opportunity. They at least have sparks of personality that would, to be fair, likely be gone were they to be the MC's.) (They could wipe out the entire five person ‘main cast' and the most I would feel is an even stronger sense of ‘why did I bother?')

The plot is bog standard, recycled sci-fi fair. There isn't original here, though there is a lot that I personally dislike. (I deeply, deeply hate when my sci-fi takes a turn into horror which I feel that this did, around the halfway point. It does climb back out, after awhile, but by then the damage was done and I had, it turns out, completely checked out. For me horror is often categorized by a lack of characters to care about, characters to feel anything for and more of a focus on how grotesque/disgusting something is. And this book never really pulled out of that. shrugs)

I find it extremely jarring that in the preface of the 10th anniversary edition, the authors said ‘the project was a love letter to the science fiction of the 70's [...] with an updated, contemporary sensibility' when there is very little here that isn't sci-fi straight out of the 70's or 80's. The two narrators are still straight, cis, white men. Yeah, that's updated. I mean, there were none of them as narrators in the 70's, right? There a five person main cast and there is only one woman. Are any of the main cast BIPOC? (I think Naomi is, but I don't know if that's because it was said or I'm just linking her to the show Naomi. Was Alex? It seemed like he might be?) How about literally any LGBT+ rep - or at least the aforementioned straight, cis, white men narrators not lusting after a woman for over half the book and/or fancying they're in love with a woman and/or maybe a little less hardcore heteronormativity?

(Also, it just generally pisses me off/creeps me out that our missing female macguffin also functions as a love interest for one of our MC's because he talks to her in his head.)

What's absolutely hilarious to me - and somewhat appalling - is that the more I read this book, the less I liked it. We started out, for the first quarter or so, at around an estimated for stars. (That might have been a little high, but I was enjoying it.) Each quarter my estimation dropped by one star until I was left with this mess that I would have just been all around happier if I hadn't read.