Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If your boyfriend is a bad dude, and you like bad men in general, does that make you a bad person? You'd think that a futuristic spy novel could come up with a better premise than that, but "good woman in love with a bad man" is about as thought-provoking as it gets in this lame thriller. I like science fiction and urban fantasy, so I was excited when I heard good things about this novel. Unfortunately, it was a stale ripoff of every thriller and near-future science fiction cliche you can think of. Most of the science fiction elements - fancy electric cars, facial recognition software, etc. - were so much window dressing. Every scene was pretty much the same - Peri, the time-erasing protagonist, vaults into a room, hits some guy with a gun and knocks it out of his hand, then points said gun at the guy. They have a heated argument with their jaws clenched - and their jaws clench a lot. Some stomachs clench, faces clench, a heart clenches, but mostly it's the jaws - the phrase "her jaw clenched" or "his jaw clenched" appears on nearly every single page. No, I'm not exaggerating - sometimes, multiple jaws clench on any given page. They sometimes clench a few sentences apart (the record, at least while I was counting, was three sentences from one clench to the next). There's nothing wrong with a good jaw clench, but that phrase is used literally hundreds of times. That's pretty much it for this book - heated arguments with jaws clenched while people point guns at each other. And if you think I'm exaggerating, there's a scene about two thirds of the way into the book where two guys, Silas and Allen (who are sort of friends, but may or may not be on the same side) are having a heated, clenching argument. Silas is angry and pulls a gun on Allen - Silas is angry with Allen for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Peri pulled a gun on him earlier. "If she didn't shoot you the first second she saw you, she wasn't going to," says Allen. Silas replies "This isn't about her pointing a gun at me... You think she's never done that before?" In other words, they're having a gun-toting argument about previous gun-toting argument, and Silas's defense is that they've had so many gun-toting arguments that he's no longer phased by them. It also illustrates the point that Peri is constantly pointing guns at people, most of whom (like Allen) are aware that despite all the jaw clenching and gun toting, Peri rarely intends to actually shoot anyone, and they all know it. Almost every scene in the book is just angry, pointless posturing. I also didn't like Peri as a character. Her constant waffling over "bad men" was tiresome. She's also probably the worst "Mary Sue" I've ever encountered in fiction. Despite the constant gun-pointing and jaw-clenching anger, almost every man in the book was in love with her. People she just met suddenly dropped everything in their lives to help her. When she wasn't actively in a scene, the people involved usually just talked about Peri, how awesome she was, and argued about who was really cared about her the most. If there's a Mary Sue reverse-Bechdel test, this novel failed miserably. Is there a redeeming feature of this book? Well, the initial premise was interesting- the idea that a select group of people have the ability to rewrite time, & then used that ability to be secret agents. If you like the premise of rewriting time, I'd highly suggest "All You Need is Kill" (which was made into the movie alternately known as "Live. Die. Repeat" and "Edge of Tomorrow"). And the movie "Memento" already covered a lot of this ground. There's just nothing original or interesting enough in the book to overcome its many jaw-clinching flaws.