The concept was appealing to me which is what got me to buy the audiobook in the first place and for the most part I think it lived up to expectations.
I thought the narrators did an outstanding job.
The writing however just had too much racism, pointless virtue-signaling and sweeping moral relativism for my taste; with the author buying into all of the nonsense tropes that were so popular from 2020-2024.
Within the first 10 minutes of the story the main female protagonist asks a male character what his ‘cute friend’s name is’, and then that same female goes off on some weird feminist rant about how offended, objectified and dehumanized she is when a male character tells her that he thinks she is ‘cute’. 🤮
The author goes out of her way to make sure readers know that the affluent / successful characters in the story are all Caucasian. The woman with the ‘pinched white face’, the young man who looked like a walking advertisement for Nautica and only got his job because his ‘rich white father’ was in the same fraternity is the company owner, the ‘rich white politician’ who ‘only cares about money and power’, and the list could go on and on.
The main protagonist also steals cash from the wallet of an ‘entitled white woman’, but then later laments that all of the patrons of the local pub were hard working union people so it would be inappropriate for her to steal from them. As if stealing of any kind from anyone should be acceptable.
This story would have been significantly more enjoyable were it not for the author foisting her divisive and uninformed ideological opinions on us readers as if those opinions were the simple realities of life. When in fact, those stereotypes and tropes are the most insidious form of racism and classism in that it’s lies are tolerated, accepted and encouraged in the creative arts and mainstream media that inundate today’s culture.
Demand better from the authors you support, and Authors will eventually do better for their readers.