David Sosnowski

First half is great

The first half of the book is great because it spends a lot of time setting up the six characters and gets the story rolling with a genial geekiness. In the middle long paragraphs on programming bog things down a bit. Then at the end the characters vanish one by one which might – might – be a subtle echo (there is a lot about echoes in this book) of Grandma Gladys vanishing into dementia. More likely it's that Mr. Sosnowski ran out of steam. The ending is dull, easily show more foretold, and lame.

I received a review copy of "Buzz Kill" by David Sosnowski from 47North through NetGalley.com. show less

This novel punches a lot of my buttons and tweaks a lot of my pet mental projects in a great way, but surprisingly so. I simply chose it on Netgalley based on the cover! Shame on me, right?! It looked funny.

So what did I get? Some good humor? Yes! But this is almost incidental to the main plot. Indeed, the main point is about some rather serious topics from dementia to suicide to the very nature of consciousness and cutting-edge AI research. Wow, right? And none of these are cursory beasts. show more The author takes everything very seriously, thoughtfully, and does it with some really fantastic characters in George and Pandora.

Two hackers, who never meet, but collaborate in creating an AI? Hell yeah. But make the AI serve the purpose of suicide prevention? I like the concept. Even such hard-coding might get VERY hairy. And what about consciousness? All the usual problems apply. All us Zombies, etc. :)

But none of these wonderful explorations of depression, dementia, or suicide would be quite as interesting without the wonderful cast of oh-so-real characters with all their human joys and frailties. This isn't some massive adventure. It's about what makes us, us. :)

*With some humor* :) show less

Having read and enjoyed Sosnowski’s previous two books I was quite looking forward to this one. We follow three unlikely survivors of an extinction-level event where it seems every other human being has dropped dead. One has Asperger’s, another is pregnant from a one-night stand with her gay best friend and the third a radicalised Muslim who was about to martyr himself at a school sports event.

The book deals well with the actuality of surviving such an event. With things like the smell show more of decomposing bodies left to rot where they drop and the parasites such things bring. Probably not a good idea to be living too near a zoo for when the animals start to miss their daily feed either. What will the house-pets locked in their homes resort to when they also get a little hungry and their owners starting to smell a little ripe.

There is quite a bit of social commentary on growing up in the (more or less) current United States (being set under Trump) but it’s of the more in-your-face variety than the author’s previous offerings. Probably best to be avoided if you’re of the die-hard Republican persuasion or an animal lover. I think it’s difficult to find originality in this section of the genre and that’s probably what saves this book a little. Having an Asperger’s character as one of the leads helped with this though it did at times feel like it was a zombie book only without the zombies. show less

I never ever would have picked this up if Mary Doria Russell didn't recommend it on her website. And for the first 50 or so pages, I was wondering what on earth I was thinking - I don't like vampires, and this books is totally unlike most of what I read.

I'm glad I read it, though. It takes place in a world where the vampires have won - where there are very few humans left, and those few that are left are raised on farms for vampire consumption. Most vampires just drink synthetic blood, show more though, so vampire life is pretty dull. And that's exactly the problem that faces Marty: vampire life is boring, and immortality is tedious. Until one night when he finds a mortal child who has escaped from a farm. He takes her home, planning to suck her blood, but he realizes that she can add meaning to his tedious existence: she can grow and change, and provide a challenge and a diversion for him. So he secretly keeps her and raises her to adulthood.

Sosnowski doesn't sugar-coat how horrible it is for a child to be raised trapped in a single room with only one person for company. There are parts of the book that are pretty upsetting and disturbing, because the girl, Isuzu, is pretty messed up. There are lots of wonderful father-daughter moments, and the whole thing is written in first-person from Marty's point of view, so we don't see the full depths of how screwed up she is, but there were parts of the book I had to skim over pretty quickly because I couldn't deal with thinking about her emotional state.

There are some really interesting aspects of the story, though, most notably Marty's grappling with Catholicism. He was raised Catholic in the early 20th century, and you just can't stop being Catholic. He tries to teach Isuzu something about religion, and he finds himself confiding, in a roundabout way, to a Catholic priest (oh,and the Catholic Church is the main instrument for spreading vampirism, which I found hilarious). So the religious aspects of the story are quite interesting, and insightfully written.

The book doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's what makes it work. It's written as if Marty were speaking, and he's hilarious. Parts of the book are laugh-out-loud funny, and it's a really fast read. Thanks to the humor, it is possible to not think too deeply about how messed up Isuzu is.

Ultimately, it ends up being a feel-good book, despite all of the emotional trauma. It was satisfying and fun. I feel like there could have been a little bit more depth and profundity at times - Sosnowski knows it was there, he just didn't dwell on it like he could have. But overall, the book was surprisingly enjoyable. show less