Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #2)

by Mira Grant

[empressbrooke]

Seanan McGuire's last outing under her Mira Grant brand started off strong and then left me bored, and unfortunately, this one did too. I bought it when it was on sale for $2.99 on Kindle and Seanan noted on Twitter she hoped that a large volume of sales that day would convince her publisher to go for a sequel. At the time I was like, "Hell yeah," but now I'm pretty sure I'd pass on the sequel.

Every single one of the billions of characters talk in the exact same voice, which is a very familiar and hyperverbal Seanan voice that punctuates every other sentence with an italicized word for emphasis, but usually she at least confines it to a specific character in each book. Applying it to everyone results in pages and pages and pages of elaborate talking and musing and very little of anything happening, to the point where I spent the second half of the book just dragging my feet about finishing it because I was so not engaged.

I also didn't buy that the ship's security staff had to be models hired for their looks, or that they really would have prepared for the voyage for as long as they did without making sure their security shutter system worked first. With a single cameraman on board, and a single journalist whose contract required her to interview only half the scientists on board, the explanation that all of the security staff must be photogenic for the documentary just did not pass muster. The shutter system gets fixed by mechanics without any notable obstacle toward the end of the book, there wasn't any time-sensitive reason they set sail when they did, and therefore these issues that were supposed to create suspense were just exasperating and made me roll my eyes.