Melissa > Recent Status Updates

How to describe the experience of reading this? Characters with continuously unresolved anger management issues and a lack of people skills, a dash of misogyny, a plethora of names (+ googling their pronunciation), critical information disclosed randomly in parenthesis, endless page turning between explanatory notes, a map of Greece, index of names, the genealogical tables (and the actual text), and so much Drama™

I can totally see this story working as a movie, but the writing is kinda ruining the book for me tbh

I'm missing emotional depth, for something to not be spelled out for me, for character growth beyond memory recovery. Also dialogue that doesn't sound like it's straight out of a mediocre sitcom. All of that is jarring with the flow, and an interest in science can only do so much to make me enjoy a read.

I think I haven't been this annoyed/frustrated with a book since reading Surfacing and No Longer Human, and back then it was about an annoying character or bad pacing, but the writing itself, the style was good. With this one it's just the same structure, the same rhetorical devices, the same shallow humor over and over again.

Like, the science is alright, but other than that this is so frustrating.