Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was a book interesting enough to persuade me to read through til the end, but ultimately it was a disappointing ride. For starters, Shafer could either shave off a good 100 pages of this 422-page tome that are solely filled with character musings irrelevant to the plot, or he could keep those 100 pages and justify them by having the actual plot of the book start earlier and end later (I'd prefer the latter. He did a great job setting up the three protagonists and their emotional backgrounds. Very real characters.). What I mean by this is that WTF has a very slow start - a good quarter way through the book, it starts to pick up speed, and as it's going along as fast as you'd hope for - bang - the book ends without resolving anything, a reverse in media res, so to speak. The book lays out a hopeful future for the protagonists, but doesn't reveal whether that future comes to fruition or not. You might say it's not the destination that matters, it's the journey, but when I spend this much time on a book, I want to know about that destination. Sure, there are some books that do a fabulous job with this sort of truncated ending, and Shafer could have possibly even pulled off a truncated ending, if only he had ended it a bit further down the line, such as one minute before the true event that would set the endgame in motion, not 2 hours before. Dramatic stakes, yo.

Also, the title of the book doesn't come into play until the last 10 pages. It's not a bad title but honestly, there was no point in withholding the explanation of the title until the end, it's not like it was a bombshell or anything.

A bad book? No. Who doesn't love a slightly-off-the-wall dystopian piece built around the frightening perils of information gathering? But a book I would recommend to others without having it undergo another round of editing? No.

Disclosure: I received this book through GoodReads' FirstRead Program.