Kate Dylan

Mindwalker ticks all my boxes of a great read: a fast-paced, twisty, and action-packed sci-fi thriller with a bad-ass main character, both caught up in and fighting the system, plus add an enemies-to-lovers subplot. Sil is an elite "mindwalker" who's been cybernetically enhanced and trained to take over the brains of her employers field agents/spies to help extract them from dangerous situations. When one of her assignments goes spectacularly awry and she ends up on the run and thrown in show more with the resistance, launching her non-stop quest to find the truth, avoid getting killed, righting wrongs, and accidentally falling for her enemy. The worldbuilding is intricate and convincing, and readers of all ages will root for Sil. show less

This is a very generous 3 stars, a 2 2/3 might be more appropriate.

So much wasted potential once again for a good story idea.
First of, for being a story of a heist, it is extremely slow going, and Ms Dylan is loosing herself more than once in a somewhat forced, not very fruitful somewhat toxic romance.
There is no story line about staking out the place they want to rob, only once did the group do something more daring to try to get to some information which is not handed to them on a silver show more platter.
No real planning meetings where the group can show off their findings and ideas, maybe even mock run throughs, all the she-bang that makes a heist story catching.
The heist itself ... forced and rushed and predictable. The whole conclusion of the book was very rushed and written not very engagingly either.

Ms Dylan said that her first idea had the story placed in New York but that didn't work out in the end and she HAD to make up a new world, and my question is why?
She didn't explore her new world, she didn't describe anything about it. The only things we know are that the streets are made out of cobble stone, that the there is a wall around the town and that the ocean is close by.
If I didn't over read it (because the writing was boring during the first 100 pages), then there is no description on how the holy quarters look like? How the neighbourhoods look like?
For being a book about colours, the book was pale and nearly as grey as the Gray.

I read that other readers had trouble on following the magic system, that is something I can't agree with. I thought it was all very straight forward my beef is more that there was too much reliance on Chase having the fitting magic right at hand instead of them working with what the rest of the group had.
Magic seemed to be at times more a cop-out to solve a story conundrum instead of using it as a tool to bring the story forward.

It shows the sorry state of book boxes, that this one was one of the better ones I read this year. show less

The author advertises this as Black Widow (my favorite film of all time) meets Divergent (my middle school favorite book) so I’m seated.

3.75