BR Kingsolver

If you try to sell us an uber assassin trained from childhood that went around the world eliminating high profile targets for some sinister organization please don't make her a girly hysterical bundle of nerves in stressful situations.
You can't eat the cake and have it too. Either you have a damsel in distress or you have a badass. Pick one.
Being a trained and brainwashed agent that has no idea of how to live a normal life and deal with concepts like compassion or friendship is a common trope that nonetheless can be enjoyable if executed well but you have to keep your characters consistent.
This is something I see all the time and I just can't comprehend how no one seems to be bothered by it.
The writing is decent but the plot is weak and full of holes.

Another common flaw that annoys the hell out of me is this weird split in maturity. One second they act like teenagers and the next they have a serious heart to heart that sound like straight out of what I imagine a bad "how to be an adult" self-help book would sound like. Extremely stilted and unnatural. Usually, I associate this flaw with YA but this book might as well be tagged as YA considering how it is overflowing with ya tropes.

Ultimately it all goes the typical cringy and clichée "with the power of friendship" yadda yadda route which is where I gave up.… (more)

This one was very different than what I usually read in this genre.
It almost seems like the author delights in subverting expectations and clicheés.

The protagonists are refreshingly uncompromising and people just die in conflicts.
While being a nice change of pace this also leads to a few problems.
Many characters seem to be very blasé about tragedy and death.
This problem is confounded by the audiobook narrator because she emphasizes this blaséness.
I think a narrator trying to counteract this problem would've gone a long way to dampen that impression.
One of the causes for this impression is the breakneck pacing of this book.
I've never read a book that is paced so fast from front to back, its dizzying.
There is just no time for emotional impact. It's almost like the author had a maximum word count target.
This clashes in a few scenes with supposed war trauma the mc still suffers from.
By setting the anchor of emotional involvement to basically zero the few times the aftermath of these traumatic experiences come up they seem almost melodramatic and out of place.

By rushing through the plot at this breakneck speed we get a look at a lot of different aspects of the world but because there is never enough time for more than a glimpse. It is hard to tell how consistent the world-building actually is.

The next paragraph might be considered a light spoiler but I believe it doesn't spoil anything relevant.
A pretty important element, later on, is the US government and its structure but sadly how it is portrayed is incredibly naive and stupid. There are lots of single points of failure that the bad guys want to exploit. A government built like that, in reality, could probably be toppled by a few teenagers. It's an alternative world, I get it, but no government could possibly exist with a naive structure to that extent. Just research the public part of how the actual US government security structure is built to get a clue of how bad this really is.

I really enjoyed how different this book is from the beaten path of UF but it could've done with an additional 100 or so pages as well as a less gullible government structure but the latter probably would've thrown a pretty big wrench into the main plot.… (more)

This one wasn't as stupidly fast-paced as the first one was and had a more solid core plot.

The nonchalance about killing people among other things that made the first book stand out from the crowd somewhat lost its appeal as there is nothing more that connects me to the story or characters.

The entire book seems very much like an improved carbon copy of the first one. A lot of key scenes are almost identical.

In the first one, I had difficulties telling if all the magics etc. are really just part of really good upfront world-building or if the stuff is just made up on the spot. Sadly I am almost certain most of it is the latter. There wasn't much room in the first one to find evidence for this but there is a lot of stuff that would've fundamentally changed the plot development of the first book if it hadn't only been invented later on.

So, it was still entertaining but the plot planning was lazy. It's basically fully discovery written without a lot of effort towards consistency.
Furthermore, I still haven't really connected to the MC as there just is little to connect to.
In conclusion, I lost interest and won't continue the series beyond. I just don't see later books tieing it all together and filling in the blanks and my emotional attachment is basically zero as well.… (more)

I loved the gritty borderline dystopian corporately controlled world.
I enjoyed reading about an MC who didn't cry herself to sleep for weeks after killing a rapist or murderer in self-defense for once.
While the book is brutally honest at times and doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, I appreciated that it doesn't wallow in the pain and suffering unnecessarily with this almost sadistic glee like most darker books do.

There is a weird dichotomy between the MC being selfless and heart-warmingly sweet but at the same time a stone-cold killer without any regrets even if her victims might not have deserved what they got.
This contrast makes the MC appear extremely callous sometimes even though I wouldn't have given it a second thought if she wasn't also a goodie-two-shoes at times.
Both, her selflessness and strong motivation to help the destitute, as well as her work as a literal assassin, become unbelievable when considered in the context of each other.
She seems to arbitrarily switch between being an "everyone deserves a second chance" kind of attitude and her just murdering people left and right without a second thought.

Beyond that, the MC is just completely OP. She ends up in a few dicey situations in later books that she can't just shrug herself out of but she never gets confronted with something that even came close to feeling actually dangerous to her.
If you are aversed to overpowered multi-talents that border on mary sue you will not enjoy this book.

This lead to a general lack of suspense which caused me to frequently space out and having to rewind the audiobook, and even then I am not sure I didn't miss entire paragraphs every now and then without ever noticing.
I am reluctant to write that it doesn't have depth because it feels like a huge amount of work went into constructing the plots, and a few relationships which are important to the MC get developed well later on. But on the other hand, the absurdly strong abilities of the MC trivialize and devalue all that effort in a way. It's a bit like you just managed to knot the gordian knot riddle and then some bitch ass alexander guy comes along and just chops it open with his sword.… (more)