It's been a few months since I've read this book, and to be honest, I didn't remember much about it until I went back and looked through it. The characters were alright, but felt flat. The writing was nice and flowed well. The plot was a little hard to follow at times.
First off, I should point out the protagonists are literal cutouts of tropes, like, literal flat, paper-thin, person-shaped cut-outs. And put together, the two of them have all the personality of dead tumbleweed.
The problem was, there wasn't enough specifics and particulars in their characterizations to separate them from the same old, same old.
Oh, I suppose the characters were all different enough from each other to kinda muddle along and keep the plot going-ish, but in the end, none of them were fleshed out so as to feel real. And while Nasir's character was juuust a bit better because of his 'inner conflict', it was, as far as I'm concerned, rather poorly written, seeing as how there was nothing more to it than description after overlong description of him moping in cold-ass, masochistic self-denial of his feelings, god forbid.
And as for the plot, ugh. Small sputters of plot progression are trapped between meaningless pages of plodding through... some... desert. And let me say, what did happen was nothing but more rope for the plot to hang itself, because it was so goddarn tropey, and reading it made my life filter away until I inhaled my last, shuffling off this mortal coil of withered dreams and stale, cliché-littered writings.
First off, I should point out the protagonists are literal cutouts of tropes, like, literal flat, paper-thin, person-shaped cut-outs. And put together, the two of them have all the personality of dead tumbleweed.
The problem was, there wasn't enough specifics and particulars in their characterizations to separate them from the same old, same old.
Oh, I suppose the characters were all different enough from each other to kinda muddle along and keep the plot going-ish, but in the end, none of them were fleshed out so as to feel real. And while Nasir's character was juuust a bit better because of his 'inner conflict', it was, as far as I'm concerned, rather poorly written, seeing as how there was nothing more to it than description after overlong description of him moping in cold-ass, masochistic self-denial of his feelings, god forbid.
And as for the plot, ugh. Small sputters of plot progression are trapped between meaningless pages of plodding through... some... desert. And let me say, what did happen was nothing but more rope for the plot to hang itself, because it was so goddarn tropey, and reading it made my life filter away until I inhaled my last, shuffling off this mortal coil of withered dreams and stale, cliché-littered writings.