Hench

First real review on the new site. Yikes! [light spoilers ahead]

This one sounded fun. Heroes vs Villains. Gig Economy. Data Science. Overall, I found it to be lacking in depth and key themes and concepts weren’t flushed out that well.

The main villain was oddly described, and I could never really picture him in my mind. I’m not usually a literal interpreter when it comes characters and places in literature. That is, I don’t immediately bring to mind the exact image of a person or place - I usually condense it into a broad visual, but in this case I had a hard time understanding the man/machine hybrid that was Leviathan.

There was a lot being made about the main character and her genius when it comes to data. Having been around many brilliant data scientists, and played with doing real data science from time to time, it was a bit hard to suspend disbelief when it came to the descriptions of working with data and information. There were a lot of “we looked at the data and it became totally clear” moments, which (a) never actually happens and (b) seemed to involve looking at photos and social media posts. Unfortunately, this always took me out of the story.

There were also a few plot points and story lines that never really resolved themselves. A superhero goes to work with the villains because they agree to give her information. I don’t recall that ever actually happening, and it’s just dropped. Understandably the book has to move forward, but it was a pretty big piece of the beginning of the third act that was just brushed away.

Also, small issues with editing always eat at me, and there were a few. ¹

Don’t think I’ll need to continue the series.