Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

While this is standard fare Young Adult Fiction and usually I would just move on with my day knowing what problems that genre has, this book causes problems due to being connected to the name Stranger Things. A whole lot of absolutely nothing happens in this book, the standard college kids with a modern view of early 20s in the Vietnam War era. This is perfectly fine on it's own. The problem is this book promised us the origin of 11 and her mother. Technically this book does that, but it takes Brenner well out of character compared to his season 1 counterpart, you still through mind numbing amounts of planning and failing and planning and failing, the amount of political pushing is unnecessary (even for a Nam era novel), and the insane and pointless parallels to Lord of the Rings is more than I could tolerate. It has none of the love for it's references that the show has. It makes me question if the demographic for this show is adults or early teens. I understand that a female author writing the perspective of a female is important, but instead of an adult novel that not only told me the story of a struggling young woman and her life in a very troubled era of this country while being experimented on (though she not only signed up for this she pretended to be someone else to get into the program in the first place), mostly I got a very anachronistic heist novel that needed to make sure I understood what inclusivity is. Inclusion is important, but berating me with it helps no one. I forgot that the point of the book was to tell us about the MK-Ultra Program because 50% of it was making elaborate plans that never work out and that we know never work out cause we've seen the show. The part where we find out how 11 got to be where she is now is literally in the last chapter. Just skip to there cause it's the only bit worth reading. I cannot believe how disappointing this novel was.