The characters in these stories just didn’t feel real to me.
Finch acts like a moody teenager all the time, rolling his eyes and groaning constantly while doing absolutely nothing about what’s annoying him.
The first book had a really annoying child sidekick, but hey, she’s a kid, kids are allowed to be annoying (even if I rather not read about it).
Seeing the blurb for the second book and realising the kid would be taking a back seat, I moved on with a little more confidence.
The spirit… is even worse. Somehow even more annoying and ridiculously naive than the literal child – so much so that it utterly strained credulity. The spirit had a conscious and was sentient in the first book, why, when it inhabits a body, does it revert to a literal child, completely unable to read social queues?
Why was this even decided as a plot device? It completely detracts from the actual cool shit in the book.
Then I hard noped out when Finch froze like a literal teenager when the spirit says ‘pussy.’ I’ve never, in my entire life, not even from my own *mother* (who despises cursing), ever seen a reaction to such a benign word more intense than an eyeroll – maybe a scoff or sneer if the context is vulgar enough. Finch doesn’t do any of these things, he literally freezes as if the spirit brought up his dead brother, as if she said Lord Voldemort’s name.
It was the moment I hard noped out, but to be fair, I wasn’t enjoying myself before that, so maybe I’m just overblowing that incident. It was just the first time I felt like the author’s gender reached out and smacked me in the face, and it completely pulled me out of the story.
Maybe this is what women feel like when male authors write female characters? I couldn’t say – but Finch always just felt… off. I wrote it off in the first book because he was still getting over a tragedy and opening up again, but literally every interaction with the spirit in this book just felt… way too cringe – less like a grown-ass man and more like an anime protagonist.
I won’t be continuing with this series, but judging by the reviews, either everyone else is crazy, or I just have much, *much* higher standards for what constitutes good writing and character development.
Maybe unreasonably so, I dunno.