Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤'s Reviews > Blackfish City

Sadly, I found it impossible to connect with this story. It is one that I would normally love and I was so intrigued after reading the premise, so looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately it did not meet my expectations. I thought if I was patient enough, I'd finally "get into it", but nope, never did. The last 30 pages I enjoyed more than the rest, but that didn't make up for struggling through the previous 295. So why didn't I love it? I mean, it's got ingredients that would make for a kick-ass, highly intriguing, un-put-downable book:

A very diverse set of characters, including an orca-riding, polar bear-befriending lesbian ✓

A mysterious, deadly, and highly contagious disease spreading through the city's denizens ✓

A corrupt government ✓

Human beings mentally bonded with other animals using nanotechnology ✓

Organized crime ✓

Crazy nut-job fundamentalists ✓

A shady pharmaceutical company experimenting on poor refugees ✓

The setting: A floating man-made city near the Arctic, after much of the earth's land becomes uninhabitable ✓

With all those juicy elements, this should have made for an awesome book and it was for some. For me though, I just couldn't get into it. There aren't many authors, in my opinion, who can pull off a novel told by many people's point of view. This book has several and as soon as I'd start getting interested in one character, it would jump to the next. Then the next. Then the next, and so on. I found the book too disjointed, too all-over-the-place. I think it would have been much better to tell this story using the voice of one narrator. Sam Miller is certainly gifted, very imaginative and possessing a talent for writing beautifully descriptive prose. I will be watching him in the future, because I think he has the capability for brilliance. This book though, just didn't do it for me.