Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Not sure how this is getting any buzz. I fell for the buzz. The prologue felt like someone who had never actually done any historical research beyond watching period films. But I said, eh, it's a prologue. Then. Kendra. Oh my god. Kendra. I hate the term Mary Sue so much, because it's often deployed to destroy females writing female characters, but this? This right here? Is a textbook Mary Sue. Let's do a checklist: * mysterious origin that makes her *special* * insanely beautiful * ridiculously talented, not just in one thing, but in everything * smarter than everyone * unpleasant and nasty and self-righteous to everyone. This is a shallow take on the 'strong female character'--she's entirely unrelatable, and if she's supposed to be a fantasy projection, I don't want any part of it. The sexism was just insane as well. From the minute Kendra is introduced (even before, really, but maybe we can ascribe that to history), on literally every page we are reminded how sexist literally everyone around her is. Not just the men, of course, but those godawful sexist nurses, too (who, of course, are female, because why have male nurses and female doctors? That would disrupt the Ginormous Wave of Sexism Kendra is singlehandedly fighting for all of us.) (I'm keeping this to early chapters to not spoiler the book). I don't know if we're supposed to feel sorry for her, but it's just so unrealistic, and frankly insulting. Every male is a sexist jerk, every single one, to a greater or lesser degree. Even Leeds is patronizing. This is an insult to many men who might work in these alphabet soup agencies. We get so many of them introd at once they're hard to keep straight, except they're all sexist and don't think Our Hero Kendra is up for the job. The narrative sets it up so that she's going to go against the rules (doubtless because those rules were made up by those sexist pesky men to keep her *down* or something, yeah, even the one about getting a psych eval after a traumatic incident), and of course will justify her choice. I don't know who could enjoy this book. How could a man enjoy the fact that every male character in this book is hideous? How could a woman of any intelligence possibly admire Kendra and her super speshul snowflakeness tied into a bizarre romance? It's regressive on all fronts. And the writing. Okay, say you just came from YA fiction so you love you some super shallow special snowflake heroines. The writing. My god. Point of View shifts without explanation or break or logic, clumsy sentence structure, dialog that is basically every cliche of a cop movie thrown through a blender (the first assault, for example)....the author has seemingly done no research other than rehashing generic stuff. This is absolutely a painful read, but I persisted because I believed it had to get better. That the suspense and mystery it was leading toward would pay off--that plot driven can make up for bad characters. I was wrong. Save your time (500 pages). Save your money. You've already seen everything this book offers already.