Shelle Perry's Reviews > Zenko

** spoiler alert ** DNF at 78%

I tried, I really did. The blurb grabbed my attention. The bones of the story are good, the concept is a great one, and the characters are charismatic. All the pieces should be in place for a rippin' episode in the epic adventures of Red Squadron. The problem is, at this point, I am making myself keep reading. A book that should have taken me less than three hours to read has been dragging me through the last 36 hours.

Editing and proofing is my first complaint. There are so many sentence fragments, changed tenses, and misspelled words that it slowed down my reading to a crawl at times.

Next is the mesh of characters. At first glance, they seem like a great mix of personalities. Unfortunately, trying to figure out which personality belongs to which character is a huge strain especially since there are no real descriptions. Also, it would seem there is a specific reading order for the interconnected series since the characters all knew each other's history, but I was lost in book one.

Finally, credibility is stretched to the breaking point. The behavior of these teams and individuals would keep regular military in a hot zone from having a long career. We are supposed to believe that these men were, once upon a time, disciplined enough to be former spec ops, then pulled into even more elite black ops teams, but now act like frat boys playing laser tag. It just doesn't sit right. Add to that the instalove hangover the MCs are fogging up the story with and I am just done. There are only so many times the CO can tell his men to get their actual heads on straight before it becomes a drinking game for the reader, and hanging a lantern on their "odd" behavior toward each other works once but over and over, it becomes numb.

I may come back to this world because it really does look like it should be fun, but for now, it is way down on my TBR list.