anyone who thinks this is a bad book is wrong.

i was entertained for about 80% of this novel. as i was reading the chapters, it felt like i was reading pretty quickly but the book was still fairly slow. i don’t remember how many chapters there were but i think there was 50? but it does have 2 point of views.

speaking of pov’s, noah’s chapters were pretty boring when he wasn’t with min and tack because—no offense—he literally has no life and all he ever did was talk about his problems. we literally heard about it in every chapter noah, we no longer care!

tack carried this book, by the way. ( )

anyone who thinks this is a bad book is wrong.

i was entertained for about 80% of this novel. as i was reading the chapters, it felt like i was reading pretty quickly but the book was still fairly slow. i don’t remember how many chapters there were but i think there was 50? but it does have 2 point of views.

speaking of pov’s, noah’s chapters were pretty boring when he wasn’t with min and tack because—no offense—he literally has no life and all he ever did was talk about his problems. we literally heard about it in every chapter noah, we no longer care!

tack carried this book, by the way. ( )

Nope. No no no no no. What a tragedy. An intriguing premise ruined by bad plotting and structure. The main problem: The author tries to draw out the suspense of the mystery too long. Judging from other reviews, I'm not the only one with this reaction.

It’s like this: Imagine you’re reading a suspense novel and the bad guy has a gun aimed at the hero. And you read: “The villain’s finger on the trigger tightened... tightened...”

This can create suspense. But now imagine reading, for 63 pages,

tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened...

Writers must accept the fact that tension must be resolved, or it stops being tension and becomes boring. No amount of wishing can change the fact that writing tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... tightened... for 100 times as long does not create 100 times the tension: it kills the tension and replaces it with tedium.

“But I want to create 100 times the tension!” the author wails. Sorry. There is only so much tension that fiction can create. You cannot go beyond that limit, and trying to only ruins the story.

The initial mystery: Our Heroine is killed on her even-numbered birthdays by a mysterious murderer. She always wakes up unharmed. Hmm. What the hell is going on here? Great premise! Well-written too, as far as genre expectations go, which means it’s not overwritten, but written plainly so the events aren’t obscured by the writing.

But then... sigh. This goes on and on, and on. Our Heroine, and later other people, are killed and then mysteriously resurrected. And we don’t know how this is possible! Yes, we got that. There’s a mystery. Understood. We get it. Now you need to start resolving it, author. I’m not criticizing the first five murder flashbacks, which are needed to show the variety of ways the main character tries to avoid or fight her killer and her persistent failures - that’s good storytelling because it shows us the brutality of her enemy and the hardness of the problem she’s trying to crack. What is objectionable is that this is then applied to another character, then an entire high school class of students, who die and then live again, as if this is something new, or as if it deepens the mystery. But it doesn’t deepen the mystery; it’s just more of the same. We already know there’s resurrection magic or super science or psychological mind-fuckery or whatever afoot. Now you’ve gotta start explaining it.

The author probably doesn’t want to explain it too soon because then the driving force of the plot is lost. The solution is to create a story that continues to have a driving force even after that initial mystery is solved. That’s what competent, non-lazy writers do!

(A writer who’s good at this is Scott Lynch, who knows how to dump crap on his characters such that even when they solve one problem they’ve still got at least one more to deal with. See his The Lies of Locke Lamora for an excellent example of how to do this.)

To illustrate this for Nemesis I have to give away the answer to the main mystery, so don’t read beyond here if you want to avoid spoilers.

The answer, which I found by skipping ahead when I got too bored to tolerate the boring “suspense” any longer, is as follows:

Much of the novel takes place in a simulation. The simulators can do whatever they want, of course. They can easily kill you and then resurrect you. But by the time the main characters learn this, the simulators themselves have all died, because the Earth’s surface has been destroyed in a planetary disaster. The main characters are simulations being run on a computer that’s deep underground. (How they know all this: long story.) Plenty of tension could be created here. E.g. automated warnings flash across the sky: “Energy cells at 10%. System failure in four days.” Our heroes have to somehow break out of the simulation and instantiate themselves in physical bodies within four days! That’s pretty good tension, if I say so myself, and I literally just thought it up while writing this.

I think the author became obsessed with the original mystery to the point that he couldn’t imagine going beyond it to something else. A pity. This could have been - indeed it started out as - a better-than-average suspense novel. As it is, I didn’t finish it, will be discarding it, and won’t pick up the sequel. Sigh. What a waste. ( )

Every even numbered birthday since Min was eight, she's been murdered violently. Yet she always wakes up the next day in the woods, alive and whole. After telling her story twice, at eight and ten, she vows to keep silent. She's diagnosed with associative personality disorder, and given medication. Flash forward to her 16th birthday murder: the stranger who appears every year speaks, "Last time." In the midst of all of this an asteroid is coming that could devastate Earth. Oh, and as always there is the regular high school bully stuff. Betrayals will come, questions will be asked, and Min will find out very few can be trusted.

This was quite a ride. I'm still not sure I understand everything, myself. The end left me with many questions. It is an interesting dystopian, since it is modern day--not quite the usual. The characters even referenced [book: The Hunger Games.} ( )

Okay, so I'm not really sure what just happened and I legitimately have no idea how to describe this book. Nemesis is engrossing and tense and a topsy-turvy thrill ride, and yet, I have mixed feelings. We're posed a whole heaping of questions and get answers to maybe three of them, while almost all of the book is dedicated to building this borderline painful suspense with only a few vague scraps of clues about what is ACTUALLY going on, and then we get a very confusing info-dump in the final ten pages and the books ends. ( )