Hit

by Delilah S. Dawson

[Amber]

Hit was not the best book I’ve read this year, which is a shame because Ms. Dawson is lovely and I was really intrigued by the concept. I mean, hitmen?! YES PLEASE. Give me alllll the hitmen. Unfortunately, I ended up having quite a few issues with this book and I didn’t really enjoy it after the first fifty or so pages.


Hit starts off well, as do a lot of books that I end up not enjoying, as it introduces Patsy, the main character, and a world where a bank has pretty much taken over the American government and is turning people into hitmen and killing many others. Like I said, the concept is awesome. I’m totally behind the evil bank/government/hitmen idea. But the execution was off.

First thing’s first [I’m the realest], I thought the timeline was silly. Patsy has five days to kill ten people, and Hit begins on her first day. She is not a hardened assassin, but nor is she particularly affecting by the way she kills people. For a book about hitmen, there was very little action, and Hit just follows Patsy as she goes from one house to another. It’s not very interesting, and I didn’t get either the badass scenes or the emotional attachment that I was expecting from this book and its main character.

Then there’s the ship. Oh my god, the ship. It’s not even a ship for me, it’s a couple of characters with little to no chemistry and a guy with tonnes of Edward Cullen vibes. First of all, Wyatt and Patsy made no sense at all as a couple. Patsy killed his father and was going to kill his brother, and all of a sudden Wyatt is travelling around with her as she goes to kill people. A) Did he not have a problem with this? B) Why didn’t he have a problem with this? C) Why? And then there’s the scene where they’re making out in the back of the van and Wyatt flings himself off of Patsy, Edward Cullen/Stefan Salvatore style, like NO I MUSTN’T TOUCH YOU. I got some violent flashbacks with that scene, let me tell you. Wyatt also calls Patsy “girl” and I really hate that pet name. *shudders*

My third and probably final problem with this book was the use of the term “spastic”. I’ve done a bit of Googling and apparently “spastic” doesn’t have such negative connotations in the US, but here in the UK it’s a derogatory term used to refer to disabled people. And I fucking hate it. Dawson is from the US so I don’t hold this against her at all, but Patsy using that word really riled me up. So. Yeah. That was fun.

In case you can’t tell, I won’t be recommending Hit to anybody. Much like Twilight, Hit is a terrible romance story thinly veiled as action-packed genre fiction. I’m disappointed, to say the least.