False Memory by Dan Krokos
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I want to start by saying that I read this book right after the excellent The Prey (see here), and pretty much any book would suffer by comparison. Having said that, this book is just meh.
It isn't just the cliched teenage-amnesiac story. It isn't the overly convoluted, twisty plot I could hardly follow, and the fact you know straight up that most of the things the protagonist is telling you aren't true (because the book's title is--wait for it--False Memory). It isn't the heavy-duty ethics lapses, such as one major character, Rhys, murdering the clones of the four protagonists and nobody thinking twice about it.
The book's most fatal flaw is the four main characters are deader than doornails.
No, they're not literally dead, not zombies or vampires, although that might spice things up a bit. They're simply unremarkable. They have no defining characteristics, no memorable voices, no life. One of them, Olive, dies in a throwaway death scene and the narrator hardly blinks. I felt like I needed a scorecard to tell them apart, because they completely lacked the little quirks and tics of real, fully developed characters. Then I realized I didn't care enough about them to demand a scorecard.
I don't know who edited this book, but there's some major fail here. This is one of those books where you say, "Hell, I can do better than that. I've already done better than that."
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