** EDIT: I was going back through my books for the year, and I can't stand by my original rating of two stars. The experience of reading this book was bad. I honestly have no positive memories of this book. I would have DNFed it if it weren't an ARC. All of those things put together should equal a one-star rating, but I think I went with two because this is one of the first ARCs I was approved for, and I was so excited about the experience that I tended to rate ARCs higher than I probably would have if I'd picked them up in the store. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming :) **

Alright friends, let's jump into it. Based on the other reviews of this book and the summary, I thought I would really like it. And I stand by my early analysis that it's a fascinating premise that has a lot of promise. The problem, though, is in the execution. I'm gonna be completely honest here, it took a lot of willpower for me to get through this book. I definitely skimmed through pretty significant chunks of it.

The Thirteenth Guardian is first and foremost a survival apocalypse book, about a group of people working to survive a series of increasingly devastating natural disasters. And yes, it features secret societies and conspiracies and all that delicious goodness. However, I couldn't enjoy those things, because, in my opinion, this book failed in a couple other, more important areas.

1) Main characters. The Thirteenth Guardian follows (mostly) six main characters as they try to survive. However, my beef with literally all of the characters is that they are the kind of characters I wrote as a sixth grader: obnoxiously perfect, good at everything, and extremely unrelatable. Avery is a) extremely beautiful b) a star basketball player and c) Very Smart and studying astrophysics at Stanford. This is just one example, but it tracks for all the rest of our characters. Because of this, I disliked them from the beginning and was never able to root for them or feel invested in their stories. My emotions towards them ranged from apathy to pure hatred, but if there isn't a single character I like, you can bet I won't like the book. (Remi in particular...oof. Talk about unlikable.)

2) Side characters / POVs. If you thought to yourself, "Six main characters? Sounds like kind of a lot" then you have another thing coming. This book switched POVs like nobody's business (like...usually several times each chapter) and added new ones constantly. I believe the author was going for a vignette sort of feel, but for me, every time a new POV was introduced, I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth. Each POV, no matter how inconsequential, got a backstory which took up entirely too much time. I was bored and even more disinterested in these brief side characters than I was in our main six.

3) Writing style. The last thing that really took me out of this book and made me struggle through it was the writing style. Normally, I wouldn't criticize an author for their writing, but in this book, it negatively impacted my reading experience in a big way. The author seemed to avoid contractions like the plague, which led to unnatural feeling dialogue. It was deadpan to a fault, and in the beginning, in particular, I just felt like I was reading a math textbook or something. There was also a lot of repetition that felt like the author didn't trust the reader to make even the smallest of leaps (a la "'Wow,' he said with shock. He did not expect the other man to know this." Not a direct quote but this was the vibe). I resorted to the skimming because reading every word made me want to smash my face into a wall.

I gave this book two stars because the actual action was pretty good, and I still think the premise has promise. It was a good idea, but man, the execution. I can't recommend this book.

ARC provided via NetGalley