Matt > Recent Status Updates

"as she slammed it down on his head, she felt it hit him" 😮 wow this action is intense

I love that this character is supposed to be an over the top american mans man but his only distinct personality trait is that he always wants a cheeseburger. At least it's accurate

I've also been so confused because every time the main character speaks French the narrator uses a french accent, even though it's just written in english, and I was like, who is speaking right now?? That's so unnecessary

I switched to the audiobook and the narrator is doing whole sections that are focused on the french character in a French accent 😭 just describing his thoughts but they have to sound French 🤣

I'm torn because if a robot wrote this book in 35 seconds then I don't want to waste my time reading it, but it has so many stellar examples of poor writing that I'm almost enjoying it anyway

When learning about Blake Pierce I discovered that Nancy Drew and other classics were also written by corporate ghost teams, and I'm conflicted. Obviously writing is a poor use of AI since most writers actually enjoy it. If it's AI I hope this is the first and last AI book I ever read. But I guess there's nothing wrong with the ghost thing. Filling this market doesn't take anything away from real literature

I wanted to know if Blake Pierce was a man or a woman because the writing always made me assume it was a chick for some reason. And I thought, Blake? Turns out it's some book company using ghost writers and probably AI and now I'm depressed.

A big problem with this writing is the constant use of the passive voice and the vast majority of the scene being filtered through the main characters perspective when we're in the third person, so she's not telling us the story, but it still feels like she is. We don't get to know what's happening until she looks around or acknowledges something. To be fair I'd be surprised if the author cares about immersion

One page later, "she walked out into the pallid spring sunshine." When did she walk back in? 🤣

"they walked into the fresh, cool air of outside" is the most descriptive this book has been yet for the settings and we're supposed to be in Paris

Great storytelling- she's like, so anyway I moved out of my haunted apartment, and I'm like wait, you were still living in the haunted apartment ?? 😂

I've found this story pretty interesting but it takes me out of it when the author is relying on this live chat feature to drive the plot, but they don't seem to understand how that works. It's written like everyone's messages are getting displayed as they type, which is possible, but it's such a rare feature for messaging that you'd have to explain that. It makes no sense to picture it the way it's written

I had to check on the historical accuracy of this because it's really rubbing me the wrong way how the actual experience of living in a concentration camp is glossed over. I wanna see the human bonds that survive in horrific situations like this but it is so bizarre without the context of that situation. There's a little bit of the horrors written in but it really feels off, everything's just too easy

I love it when an audiobook narrator delivers a character's line in their foreign accent as if the character would actually be speaking english in this setting

That was actually a concept for a story, so that was an improvement. Literally read like a page of brainstorming, and it honestly makes me sad to see something like that in final published form. It's a weird new idea that could have had characters and a plot if the author cared enough to flesh it out. Loads of potential as a concept, total garbage as a finished product

That wasn't a story, that was a thought exercise beginning with the presumption that gaining weight is as inevitable as gaining height... You got fiction down, you're missing the science

Yeah this is kinda all over the place... We were talking about Cuba so it jumped to the Bay of Pigs, then went into racism relating to communism in the 50s and suddenly something that happened in the 30s and now it's the 40s again. This feels sort of like an introduction to a comprehensive history but this book is already super long

Disappointed that only halfway through the book we're already into the 1900s. The cover says 1492-present but 400 years of history gets mashed into the same amount of space as the most recent century? Hopefully it goes back I guess

Second time I've caught what seems to be the author mixing up the names of their own characters/locations.. ie this lady in the town of Somerset telling the detective he must have had a long drive over from Somerset.. Errors like that make me wonder if a book was ever edited, by anyone. How do you miss the detective character saying "race you to the car!" and taking off instead of his 10 year old son 😅

Maybe it's an audiobook problem but my one complaint is too many one off references to other time periods, or just the lack of a concrete timeline relative to other events in history.. Maybe I'm just missing all the dates but I keep getting slightly confused by where we are. I guess that's still better than any history lecture I've ever been in, given that I'm listening enough to even become confused

ok when I say this feels like a first draft, I mean, this random throwaway character with one line has her name awkwardly injected into the sentence and then never mentioned again for the whole book. I stopped and searched it because her introduction was so random and rushed and this character just never occurs again lol

I love the different perspectives on history but I wish it was more cohesive. There's no transitions between chapters so we just abruptly leave one place and time and jump into another, and so far it seems to be in chronological order but there are always these moments like, wait a minute, where are we

The elderly detective character with fake knees is a nice change from the stereotypes you usually see in stories like this. I know it's not gonna end with a big exciting job offer and there's no cheesy romance

"my mind has a mind of its own" thank you for that 🤣

More dialog than story, it seems like.. I just don't like it when one of the characters is describing what's happening right in front of them instead of having any exposition, it kinda irks me for some reason

I appreciate some background info, but the subtitle of this book is "the horrifying 12 days..." and so far it's 95% history. That's interesting too but don't tell me it's one thing and give me something else

"a refreshing slap to the face" you're sort of missing the point of a metaphor here 😂 was it refreshing or does it feel like you've been slapped 😂

I know it's a safeguard against plagiarism but that's kind of a moot point these days and I'd really like to be able to copy text directly out of an ebook to comment on 😂

"even when we're living through a tragedy, the only language available to us is second hand" I think this is showing the characters detachment from the situation, but I really feel this. Platitudes that you hear all the time sound so hollow until you find yourself there and realize that they're the only things you can say. I don't see it as a bad thing though, it makes me feel more connected to other people