another month o' suffering
My DNFs for August 2022
i am so tired
reading the virtuous sinners multiauthor series was not a good idea
DNF at 56%
Look, I tried. I tried very hard (medium hard). It’s just not working.
• This book has about 50% too many pages. There is so much extraneous description - instead of setting the scene, they are just distracting and pointless. Do I care what type of oven they have? Only if someone gets baked in it. I also don’t need every single action described.
Most things are repeated in triplicate, especially in the inner monologues. Once is enough. I felt like I was getting beat over the head with every thought. I promise your readers can infer plenty! Or understand the sentence the first time.
• The pacing left a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of floating plot pieces (the relationship, the murder investigation, the assassin company thingy, the rival assassins, the missing brother, hints of secondary character relationships…) and they just drop in and out. There’s not much flow between them. At times, it feels like two books were cut together instead of one cohesive story.
• The whole entire FBI thing was just…idk. I don’t expect realism, but I struggle with there being enough Politics to have one partner fly back home every single weekend, leaving other partner just tootling around town. Or in this case, fucking the suspects. Minor detail in the face of all the other details. The FBI is incompetent here as well, just a totally shitty investigative effort on all fronts.
• There’s way too much time spent on the sex scenes. They are long, and they are frequent. They take over the book, and this isn’t supposed to be erotica so they need to calm down a little and get back to the plot (one of the plots?).
There was also no romance for me, since it was all instalust sex scenes. Their “electrical connection” is horny, not emotions. There really wasn’t one developing either, so I don’t have high hopes for it ever forming.
• I would have liked more struggles for Maddox getting involved with suspects. He dithered a little, but was generally already in the process of banging them when he dithered so it fell really flat. They have instalust connection and ride everything off of that. Maddox launches directly into sex club BDSM scene with them. It was just a little too OTT. He was 100% ready to melt down his whole career which is his entire life.
There’s one detail that just bothers me so much I have to type up a mildly unhinged rant about it:
Justin states that he and Ace are married, but he “buried it” so deeply the FBI didn’t know about their relationship. This makes no sense!!!!!!
You hid your government paperwork from the government?? Are you on insurance together? Do you own the house together? What address is on your HR paperwork?? Justin is a federal prosecutor, how does he hide his entire relationship? How would the FBI not know this basic fact with like five seconds of research?? They live together! They present as a married couple. Their neighbors know them as a couple. And yet the FBI losers are blindsided that Justin exists at all. NO!!! bad!!!! I could not handle this detail that made less than zero sense. It came up a couple times!!! nooooooooooooo
Overall, there were too many ridiculous plot points and a distinct lack of believable romantic connection to keep me interested. The plot also disappeared for large parts of the book, so there was nothing to balance out the absent romance. It also wasn’t very dark at all. One murder at the beginning, and that was it. Just a normal book.
DNF at 26%
This is my first book by this author. …yeah. Honestly one of the things that caught my attention was that it says its accountant x assassin - what is the assassin going to need an accountant for?? This is intriguing.
Lies. It is not intriguing because it doesn’t really matter than he’s an accountant. Rude.
Characters
This is dual first person POV, so we get to see inside of both characters heads and thought processes. And then judge them accordingly.
Khalil - what a dillweed. I actually strongly dislike him, and not in a fun way. He just sucks. He’s rude and judgmental of Julien, and somehow breathtakingly naive. How can he be so naive after working for the mob for x years? (timeline very unclear) I don’t even know how you can ostrich to that degree. Which is also why I really dislike him for how terrible he thinks of Julien, while noticing absolutely nothing and just nonstop judging him apparently the entire time they’ve known each other (based on the past info dump). How can I buy into a romance at all, even a past one, when all Khalil thinks about is how much he doesn’t actually like Julien??
He’s such a naive moralistic asshole, like how can you have such idiot babby opinions when you literally work for the mob!! I am pretty mad about this. Julien is doing literally all the work and this dipshit just bellyaching dragging his dumb feet being holier than thou about everything.
Julien - he’s just sort of there. He was mildly intriguing, all his maneuvering and planning and crime stuff, but its so unbalanced by Khalils bullshit I’m not interested in continuing.
Romance
I did not buy into this romance at all. It seems like it’s supposed to be a second chance type thing, based on the info dumping about their history together? Which had detail yet was intensely vague. Plus I guess they also still have hate sex? Or something? I don’t know. The writing style made it impossible for me to figure these things out.
Since I very much disliked Khalil, I wanted Julien to disappear and find someone who actually would like him and not relentlessly judge him for everything he ever does and stuff outside of his control.
The writing
I think it is clear that there is a severe mismatch in the way this is written and my personal taste, because I really hated how this was done. It’s about 80% purple, flowery, pointless prose that just drags on and on and on. It doesn’t serve to give any depth to the plot, the characters, or their (alleged) romance. It just makes me roll my eyes when they’re waxing poetic in a livejournal sort of way about appearances. This is amplified by the strange background religious imagery, I guess it’s just kind of there? Leads to some weird as hell highlights, I’ll tell you that.
It also hindered my ability to understand what was even happening, which is the worst crime for a book. The strange info dumping-past recollection stuff was confusing. It was too much information while somehow telling me very little. The timelines and even what the heck they’re doing at this point of the book occurring makes no sense to me. It’s distracting in its vagueness.
Sometimes, it seems like the effort to be poetic ends up with misused words, or even ones that are a terrible match for the scene - I have a highlight somewhere that has a flush being described as “spreading like a rash” or something, mid sex scene. Rashes and sex don’t go well together, as a mental image. Plus then they invoked super gonorrhea, so like…super sexy, thanks. Rashy infected sex.
Overall, this very much did not work for me, on pretty much every level. The accountant thing was disappointing, the mob thing was bland and disappointing, I hated Khalil and wanted Julien to find someone better, the writing was deeply unpleasant to read…….not a winner in this series.
DNF at 60%
I picked this up because of the title - Button Man. What a dumb name for an assassin. I need to know why! Button Man sounds like the neighbor of the Muffin Man.
To my absolute disappointment, I never learned why it was Button Man. Why is this a family thing, all “button men”?? I word searched when I DNFd. The only explanation (“explanation”) we ever get is early on:
I was eighteen when I made my first kill and when I returned home, covered in blood, and feeling like a piece of my soul had died with my victim, my grandfather handed me a little black box. Inside was a pin. It was made of gold, and it was a button. He and my father stood side by side that day, their eyes shining with pride, and informed me that I was now a button man.
Why a button!! Why is it a family button! If its a critical button, tell me more about this murder button! What kind!!! argh i need more information on this dumb as fuck name!!
Imagine hearing “the button man is coming for you” ok what’s he gonna do, fix my shirts? lol loser
{a post review side-note: in talking (complaining) about this with someone, they pointed out that "button man" is actually a historical, real life term for a hired killer. It's specifically related to the garment industry, which is discussed in this interview with the author of the book Button Man, Andrew Gross, who is writing about his actual family history. Which actually sounds very cool (and real life historical!) and I will totally be checking out. The term button man also makes sense as it's the connection between the Jewish mob and the garment industry.
However, the history of this term is so absent in this book that it may as well not be connected. In fact, if it was supposed to be connected, it does the term a grave disservice. I maintain my position that for this book, the name 'button men' is unthreatening and stupid because there is zero connection to the garment industry or Jewish mob to justify it. it's just some dumbass family with buttons.
thus concludes my addendum that didn't change my opinion of the book or word as it applies here at all, but did find me a whole new book to read}
I had a lot of other issues with this book, such as:
• there were two plots, the mafia thing and then random kid shit, neither of which actually meshed
• scenes were short and choppy, which was made worse by the dual choppy plot problem
• kelly was a gary stu, solving all sorts of problems and doing everything except murder
• duke was a complete dipshit, i don’t know how he walks and breathes at the same time
• kelly’s much vaunted problem solving skills with people were to talk over them, illegally threaten them, and then strut around like a dipshit
• there is zero chemistry between the leads
• conversation was very stilted and awkward, especially when it was being heavy handed expositional dialogue
• lots of random boring information that mattered absolutely not at all
• by the time i quit, they’d made like zero progress on anything
Overall, I had a bad time.
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