Brandy

great bang for buck

Revisado: 12-29-24

well worth the credit. the quality of story and voice acting is great, and the plot never went stale or stagnated, always moving.

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Compelling

Revisado: 11-22-24

Well written and compelling, but makes very little sense near the end. Cas makes a number of choices that just feel driven by the big reveals at the end, which make them feel contrived. Overall liked the book, but it could have benefited from more backstory from Cas's point of view.

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Eh

Revisado: 10-04-24

Wanted to like this. The lore was cool, but sloppily delivered in the form of heavy exposition dump. The main character feels like a caricature. The premise is promising, but feels uncomfortably like overt satire in a way that makes it more cringe inducing than interesting. The text tries to tackle some big political ideas, bur does so with zero nuance or finesse, so it feels like repeatedly getting bludgeoning with political ideology without any breathing room or chance for characters to show how things like race impact culture and society. Ignorance is treated as malice, and the response is often loud and direct, which would be fine if it were tied to a character as a trait or even as a sub-plot, but it happens more frequently than plot progression seems to occur. Rather than feeling poignant, this makes the story come across as shallow and tedious.

On the topic of plot progression, the plot feels sparse and that makes the book feel drawn out and boring. The writing is legitimately funny in some places, but it feels stretched too thin. The author should have edited to make the prose more punchy, as I think that would have improved the experience. Simillarly, there is some strong character work in the story (aside from the MC), and if the story had been more character driven, it would have been much better.

The narrator was also a bad choice. To be clear, I like Daniel Henning, and appreciated his work on the House by the Cerulean Sea books, but the voices he used were just not good for romantic situations. They came across as funny, which would have been fine if that was intentional, because humour and sex aren't mutual exclusive, but i lt was unintentional and felt cringe inducing.

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Unrealistic Tripe

Revisado: 09-15-24

potential spoilers ahead:

There were a few things that didn't feel consistent in terms of detail, but the big problem for me was that a professor of ethics kept trying to impose human morality on this artificial intelligence. For example, a great deal of effort was put into making it seem like the android fully consents legally to sexual activities, but this makes no sense from annacademic point-of-view. The android is bought and paid for by the human, and is programmed literally to be perfect for him. The android demonstrates no legitimate will of its own. This is not consent. This will never be consent.

I am not bothered by that. what bothers me is that it's such a central part of the early story, but is just bumgled. The MC does not feel like a realistic philosophy professor because he has such a convoluted view of consent. Perhaps if the MC had not been the one to purchase thr android, or if the android were malfunctioning, or if the laws around consent were about a meta-narrative relating to real consent versus implied consent - then I could have enjoyed the book.

As it is, the story comes across like an attempt at a cozy shut in romance with sci-fi elements and hastily (not well thought out) consent matters tacked on at the end to assuage second hand reader guilt. All the ethical quandries do is take the reader out of the story. They either should not be present, or should be better integrated or used.

Joel Leslie is fabulous though.

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Boring

Revisado: 04-25-23

The narration was robotic and did not convey emotion well. I found this distracting. The first story was about average in terms of how enjoyable it was; a bit tedious, but saved by the interesting conflict. There were a few too many holes in the plot, and several things that just didn't make sense. For example - one of the main characters is independently wealthy and has his own home...but for some reason acts totally beholden to his father. The story never really justifies this, and it killed the stakes set up by the aforementioned conflict. The second story is just not engaging at all. Didn't even make it to the third; in part, because it felt like the characters were too simillar, in terms of internal monologue, to those in the first story.

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