The Day Death Stopped

I'm getting too old for this.

There are a lot of problems with this book. The characters are so one dimensional and the story so straightforward I skipped from the first third of the book to the ending and still perfectly understood/expected what happened. Much of the time which could've been spent making the characters anything other than tired cliches was instead spent details which exist just to be quirky, and worldbuilding/a power system which frequently contradicts itself. I'm mildly annoyed that I wasted as much time as I did reading it.

But there was a time where I probably would've loved this, a time where I thought Artemis Fowl and Gregory House were the coolest guys ever. Where every story had to be about saving the world, or universe, or all of reality. Where paper thin characters didn't matter as long as they had aura and cool powers (both of which Claire definitely seems to have). This book was the point where I finally realised I'm not the person who loved those stories anymore, that I've grown past enjoying outright power fantasies with nothing else to offer.

Games are a different story because at least you're the main character and an active participant, but real life experiences make it hard to cheer for protagonists who give an uncomfortable window into how Elon Musk probably sees himself. The real world isn't simple enough to be fixed, saved or changed by a single source of overwhelming power, and once you realise that this kind of YA fiction loses its appeal. Thirty is probably a good decade too late to get to this point, but in my defense I stopped reading for a long while and even when I restarted it was mostly non-fiction. It may have taken a run of 3 truly mediocre YA novels to do it, but I've finally accepted that I'm an adult.