I've managed to get through more than 1/3 of this book, and I'm throwing in the towel. I'm just...done.

 

It's not strictly terrible, but I'm so bored. The main character just grates on me. Her relationship with her (married!) male best friend is awkward at best, and her children are also kind of unbelievable. She kind of wanders around in this strange floaty haze where even finding a dead body doesn't liven things up. How can that be?

 

I've checked this book out from the library four times now, and this is as far as I have gotten. Every time I check it out I read a little bit and then set it down, remembering why I set it down last time. I just can't anymore. Too many books I want to read, not enough time. 

 

This wasn't bad, but unfortunately the concept was better than the actual book.

 

We're not really looking at a completely normal "Frankenstein" story, here, as should be evident from the synopsis of the book. This isn't a pieced together monster, this is a dead guy.

 

Also, the main character, Tor, is insane.

 

Mad scientists are kind of a trope that I admit to not being particularly fond of. Tor fits it to a tee, even better, perhaps, than Victor Frankenstein himself. She has absolutely no qualms about lying, torturing, and pretty much destroying lives. She's also extremely careless, which causes a large chunk of the problems in the book.

 

I don't generally fall into the camp of "you must like the main character to like a book," but I just don't quite care enough about Tor to have much interest in following her. She's unscrupulous without it being interesting, unscrupulous in a fussy way that keeps her so detached from her work and the reader that it is hard to get invested in what is going on at any point. Add to it that Tor herself causes pretty much all of the problems that need to be solved because she has some kind of God complex and also makes a crop of mistakes, and we've got a really awkward set-up as our driving force of the novel.

 

Owen is a much better friend than Tor deserves, and I regret that he wasn't the main character.

 

I was hoping to enjoy this more than I did, but this felt like Frankenstein with all of the moral questioning and actual feeling ripped out, and unfortunately that was what I enjoyed about the original.

 

This book was provided to me for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

 

I'm done with this book. I cannot explain why I always feel so bogged down trudging through Russia unexpectedly, though I am aware of the similarity of, you know, every other invasion of Russia ever.

 

This isn't war, precisely, but I just stopped caring once it stopped being as much of a mystery and started being a story about making contacts through my least favorite part of Russian history. Maybe this turns out phenomenally, but I can't bear picking up the book and reading about half a page and then not being able to continue after that. I promised myself that this year it was okay to say I was not going to finish stuff. I intend to hold myself to that promise.  

 

I think I'm just done with this. I'm dreading picking it back up. It's not terrible, but I honestly don't care about the prophecy, and if I don't care about a bloody prophecy, this is not the book for me. Prophecies are my bread-and-butter.

 

The characters are pretty thin and rather alarmingly one-dimensional. Any questions on who is the bad sister and who is the good one? Well, no, not after about page 2. There's just not enough subtlety here for me to care at all.

 

I was really looking forward to this, but in the end I just don't care.