This book was pretty ordinary, which made me wonder how often you can accurately identify a rotten book within the first chapter? If you have a good prediction rate, you could save valuable reading time for better books. A give-away from this book was the amount of the story that was told via dialogue. Whole chapters without any narrative. And another flaw was the lack of emotional depth – much is made of a “Famous Day” that Kay and Simon spent together – so why not, you know, actually put it in the book. It needn’t even be at the start – tuck it in further down the book – but don’t leave it out completely!
Now, I think I would have given up on Free Fire too early, because that turned out to be pretty good. On the other hand, this book was poor and the only reason it escaped two stars was due to a much improved final couple of chapters.
