I have two major problems with book one. Problem one is best demonstrated with a story.
At some point I was trying to sort out the BZRK members in my head. The anhedonic one, the nice one, the lol-so-random one, and the two nondescript ones. I had trouble remembering which one of those last two did what. Then one of them died. I was relieved, since now I could break them down into "the nondescript one" and "the dead one". The thing is, I don't really care about most of the team any more than I did the one who died, even after the nondescript one gained slightly more personality. The only standout character to me was Vincent, but we spend more of our time with problem number two.
Keats and Plath's romance is the most boring thing I've read from post-Animorphs Applegrant. Which is strange, since they've written perfectly fine romance before. Rachel and Tobias from Animorphs needed each other to stay human in very different ways. Sam and Astrid from Gone kept each other in check. Even Christopher and Etain's relationship from Everworld developed one of their characters and gave weight to the actions of the other. Keats and Plath? They share scenes constantly, and neither one of them is better for it. All they do is sit around talking about the war and their relationship. It goes nowhere, and it makes the two of them (neither of whom are particularly well-developed yet) feel even more homogeneous. Keats and Plath do have some key differences that could be developed so that they're different enough that a relationship between them could be interesting, but that's not this book.
It pains me to say all this, because I really love the good stuff. The AFGC has a lot more noteworthy characters than BZRK, and it's internal politics are much more interesting. And this being a Michael Grant book, we do spend a lot of time with the "villains". The action scenes are great. The interplay between the nano and macro is amazing to read about. I just wish that so much of the book wasn't such a painful Romantic Plot Tumor, and that more of BZRK was more well-developed.
Not a Fan (book 1)
I have two major problems with book one. Problem one is best demonstrated with a story.
At some point I was trying to sort out the BZRK members in my head. The anhedonic one, the nice one, the lol-so-random one, and the two nondescript ones. I had trouble remembering which one of those last two did what. Then one of them died. I was relieved, since now I could break them down into "the nondescript one" and "the dead one". The thing is, I don't really care about most of the team any more than I did the one who died, even after the nondescript one gained slightly more personality. The only standout character to me was Vincent, but we spend more of our time with problem number two.
Keats and Plath's romance is the most boring thing I've read from post-Animorphs Applegrant. Which is strange, since they've written perfectly fine romance before. Rachel and Tobias from Animorphs needed each other to stay human in very different ways. Sam and Astrid from Gone kept each other in check. Even Christopher and Etain's relationship from Everworld developed one of their characters and gave weight to the actions of the other. Keats and Plath? They share scenes constantly, and neither one of them is better for it. All they do is sit around talking about the war and their relationship. It goes nowhere, and it makes the two of them (neither of whom are particularly well-developed yet) feel even more homogeneous. Keats and Plath do have some key differences that could be developed so that they're different enough that a relationship between them could be interesting, but that's not this book.
It pains me to say all this, because I really love the good stuff. The AFGC has a lot more noteworthy characters than BZRK, and it's internal politics are much more interesting. And this being a Michael Grant book, we do spend a lot of time with the "villains". The action scenes are great. The interplay between the nano and macro is amazing to read about. I just wish that so much of the book wasn't such a painful Romantic Plot Tumor, and that more of BZRK was more well-developed.