Abandoned by Booklikes

I DNFed this book at page 103 last night.

Life is too short for a book that is making your brain seep from your ears. There was too much being thrown at me and none of it made sense. McGuire writes this book with no world building so you are just thrown into a book where alchemy is a thing and so is putting body parts together to make a person. I can't even get into this split soul thing and what that means and the "Impossible City." They are now words that I just don't want to read anymore.

I was looking forward to reading a good science fiction book. I haven't read anything by McGuire before, but thought that the cool cover had to speak to a story I would like. The synopsis for the book also grabbed me. 

"Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story.

Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math.

Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.

Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own. 

 

Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained."

 

Too bad the book jumps around. A lot. We start off with Rodger and Dodger in a perilous situation. Then we jump into quotes. Or maybe the quotes came first. And then we get an excerpt from a short story starring two kids named Zib and Avery. And then we jump into some medical jargon. And then we go into the past (I don't know anymore). And then we just keep doing this. At page 103 I was freaking done. 

The writing was too hard to get into since I felt like I was thrown into a story already halfway started. McGuire includes chapter headings with dates thrown in and I had a bad flashback to Recursion and started to get a headache. The flow of the book doesn't work since based on the first 100 pages we just jump around, get expositions here and there, some info dumps, and then quotes, more excerpts and then I just didn't care at all what was happening.  

The setting is I assume a different world than what we inhabit where alchemy is a real thing and yes you can turn lead into gold and use it to become the most powerful being on the the planet.

Pretend I said that in an echoey powerful type voice. I just felt bored and started to think about the other books I rather be reading. I think that the way the book was written was just too much for me to get past. The writing was actually putting me off and causing me to not fully engage with this book. The science also seemed so fake that I had a hard time getting past that as well.