I don’t want to be mean. I did it once on this blog with a very successful author, and the guy actually got upset over it. Whoops. I feel like it is particularly mean when it is not a successful author. But truth be told, I tend to have more to say about a book when it is bad than when it is good.
This one was bad. Its from a series called Triana Moore: Space Janitor and on that alone I felt like it would be worth a shot.
The good of it is that the writing is mediocre. It will engage you, and I don’t think that it was badly written in that way that some books are, where your brain just tells you ‘enough’ and you realize that your eyes are going over the text but nothing is registering.
That’s me being nice.
Triana Moore is a janitor on a space station. Not that you would really notice it, but she says does say it at the end of the book. But before any janitoring can happen at the beginning of the book, the protagonist stumbles upon a dead body. Soon, she is solving the crime with a very attractive detective.
What?
The main character is the most annoying Mary-Sue I have ever read in a book. But the kind of Mary-Sue written by an American Christian conservative. Her best friend is promiscuous (though Triana isn’t, of course), but Triana doesn’t judge her. Triana goes to church too. But she isn’t an ordinary janitor – she also is some kind of genius hacker that seems know how to be completely incognito in the ship. Now, despite the fact that the ship is some kind of tiered society, and that Triana is a lowely lower deck janitor, SUPRISE, she is the daughter of the richest woman on the station, a figure who is treated like the queen. Triana is homely, not very attractive (she tells us thus repeatedly) but the very attractive detective is head over heels in love with her. Triana is also pretty much the smartest person in the cast of characters.
Please. Please stop.
I stayed with the book as long as I did because I could not believe that it was actually as superficially thin as it was. But I was wrong. It really was. If that weren’t bad enough, I was convinced for a while that it must have been written by some kind of misogynist. There are times where Triana is some kind of teenage-girl boy crazy. A character names Bobby is so hot, so ‘really hot’, that it gets nominated several times. In fact, that character is so hot that Triana is concerned that she will not be able to function around him. I’m not kidding.
The book ends with Triana not really solving the crime, but figuring out who did it and stopping them. Of course she did.
I had some kind of faith that this would come through somehow, but it didn’t pan out. It kept on breadcrumbing me things that gave me hope. Even late into the book, rich characters were named ‘Zuckerberg’ ‘Bezos’ and ‘Putin’. That go anywhere? No. There seemed to be a tiered society, where there is a difference in how lower level and higher level people live. That go anywhere? No.
Nor did the author keep the details of the story in order. At some point a character comments that the victims of the murder are a mix of male and female. Later, it is changed to be all female. There were a couple other instances of this. It was always noticeable.
The author also tried really hard to nerd cred her way into… something? I don’t know. The characters say “shiny!” alla Firefly. There is a character names Tiberius O’neill Mendoza. Yes.
Ok, I am done Kvetching.
Failures in Polymathy 