For a first novel, WTF has an impressive sense of place and character, a real, rumpled, lived-in feel. That's about the best I can say for it, though, given the glaring issues of pacing (starts slow, gets slower, then winds up in a rush of hugely unbelievable plot twists), of plot (see: "unbelievable"), and of tone. A stronger editor might be just the ticket; as it stands, I am sorry I took the proffered comparisons to Stephenson and Gibson seriously.

Awesome! Such a fun read.

Solid and fun but the ending is unsatisfactor

This sort of felt like a book-by-committee, or a book-by-focus-group.

I think my copy is missing the last 40 pages. oh wait....he did that on purpose. :( angry eyes.

Story: 3 stars
Character Development: 4 stars
Prose/Language: 4 stars

"She was sitting in an airport holding a stack of high-grade forged documents, having been stripped of her own legitimate ones by and all-girl pickpocket team."

I'm having a hard time rating this book. The conspiracy theories, secret organizations, spy stuff with car chases, and plant computers .... it was a lot of fun to read! But the story felt either too big or too small. It could have been Ludlum-like or Stephenson-esque. Not a mix of the two, which is what the reader got. I would like to have had more. Either more details around the bigger story told faster or more character development beyond the final scene. I'm not sure which way to go.

It's an interesting book; one that tells an emotional story rather than a physical one. The ending is really about the characters - Leila, Leo, and Mark - and the moral compass decisions they make. All this just happens to play out while an evil cabal tries to takeover the world. Not really sure what the author means by linking such dire global catastrophe to the emotional maturity of millennials. I could be reading too much into it.

Or not.

I think I've found the opposite of the boarding school genre, a genre that authors apparently can't write about without also making a fairly bad book. That genre: google is evil.

I get it guys. Google is the insidious data collecting machine that will destroy the free world. Cool. You know what I don't need? 200 pages of exposition that are supposed to be "building" the anticipation of google stealing all privacy. Pretty much as soon as there's a named phone or a named browser or any sort of technology with a proper noun description, privacy is destroyed and the internet is rapidly sending us all to hell in a handbasket.

I mean fine, it had some interesting parts. I kind of liked the NGO perspective on discovering Burmese secrets. That's cool.

You know what it is that bugs me? It's condescending! it's really condescending to think that anything about privacy going away is sneaky. That's implying that there haven't been TONS of voices decrying our loss of freedoms for years now. That we're totally in the dark about the dark deal we're striking when we use our free internet services. COME ON! Give people some credit! They know facebook owns their photos and uses their likeness in advertising, that google searches for words in their emails to create targeted adverts. If the only solution to that in your book world is to live off the grid and totally disconnect from the world AND THEN GO ON A GRAND QUEST TO SLAY THE GOOGLE DRAGON I just have NO interest in that.

Plus, these books are very consistently filled with people who escape the real world all the time through the aid of various drugs and mind altering substances. Which is fine, there are compelling stories about addiction, but does every hacker-savior have to be addicted to pot? Really?

I strongly recommend that you DON'T read this book. It's a waste of time, it's pretty poorly written, and just not interesting.

PS: YOU FUCKING GROW PLANTS THAT ARE COMPUTERS?!?!?! NO THAT IS BULLSHIT!!!! Don't make a whole viable super system of evil and then GIVE THE "GOOD GUYS" FUCKING MAGICAL POWERS! That destroys your whole narrative! UGH!

too much wtf for me ;)


......unless this book has a crazy double meaning, which I've spent a lot of time considering, & so maybe it's brilliant. idk. wtf.