The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher
My rating: 2/5 cats
i feel like this is a book that mistook its audience. it is like the not-as-good version of Ship Breaker. if it is supposed to be a cautionary tale for adults told in a briskly-paced “fantastic” atmosphere, it is just too raggedy. characters move forward from one illustrative peril to another, in some “parade of characters” set piece, each more unrealistic than the one before; there is no breathing room between episodes in the race to the top of mount crazy. and the whole goody-good good guys vs. mustachioed villains is too much like “what if Avatar was a book??” ugh, gimmie some nuance. but at the same time, if it is for teens, the boring, didactic shit is going to put them right off, i guarantee. the characters are flat and insipid, and the action sequences are cartoonish. that’s what’s so weird about this book. the action parts read like they were intended for a much younger-than-teen audience, needing constant stimulation (LGM) to stay focused, but the preachy parts…well, here:
The steel steps glistened, but rust had already begun to wear through on the risers. Like everything else about Bluewater, the shiny surfaces hid corrosion and corruption. The entire edifice was a monument to ignorance. The truth was that butterflies could not disrupt an entire ecosystem simply by beating their wings. It took willful neglect and deliberate blindness, the refusal to see the obvious even as the land grew toxic before our eyes. But I still held out hope that we could change our ways.
gack city. this makes me want to go out and poison the water supply my damn self. with poison.
the whole thing just put me off, as i was alternately condescended to, as a reader, and distracted by new characters and locations every three pages or so. and i don’t even want to talk about the ending. and you can’t make me.
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