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Mar 31, 2016leah_p rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
The cover of this one completely grabbed me. I thought, "This'll either be awful, or amazing, but either way I have to read it". It's like an action movie that speeds along with blood and bullets flying and well-placed one-liners. The world is fleshed out well in all its grittiness - to me it's like a mashup of Sucker Punch, Star Wars and Neuromancer (the book by William Gibson). An especially creative bit are the transcripts of commercials advertising The Sixty Islands. The plot is pretty simple but the rest of the world - depraved, corrupt, unstable - makes up for it. There was only one sour spot for me in the whole book: a key character has been diagnosed with Depressus, a terminal-in-that-world disease that mirrors what we would call depression, and at one point I felt jolted out of the narrative because it was as if everything paused so that Shea could ramble about his opinion on mental illness sufferers. The intention may have been to make that one character realize the ulterior motives of those in power, but as it is it just felt callous. Still, all in all it's a ton of fun.