Crosstalk irritates almost as much as having telepathy would

Does anyone else feel guilty giving bad reviews? This is the first actually bad review I’ll make for CBR and I feel strangely guilty.

Anyway, with that over with: I thought this book sucked. I mean it just plain sucked (I’m channelling Homer Simpson here). Meant to be a satire examining overcommunication, technological obsession, the constant connectedness of modern society, AND romance and sci-fi novels, the book overshoots and manages to be mostly a satire of itself instead. On top of that, it’s also just slow and boring. I felt like it lasted forever and half of the things that happened in it didn’t matter in the long run anyway. Entire subplots end up abandoned several times.

My biggest issue, though, was that I couldn’t stand any character in this book. The main character is hapless and can’t seem to think logically for more than one minute at a time. This is especially grating since we spend all of the book with her inner thoughts. The boyfriend she starts off with is such a parody of Jerkass Businessmen that it’s impossible to see what Briddey could ever have seen in him. Her other romantic interest only serves to rescue her or provide exposition. And the other characters, all parodies of various types of people, repeat why they are parodies so many times that I kept wanting to beg “okay, I get it, I get it. Please stop now!”

I still gave this two stars, because the central idea itself is interesting and I could see what the author was trying to say and the point she was trying to make, even if I don’t entirely agree with it. But I was left annoyed after I finished this book, and that’s never a good thing.