⭐️ - The book was fucking terrible
This series came highly recommended by an urban fantasy book group I’m in. I was incredibly disappointed. The plot was scattershot at best, and while things happened, the "conflicts" packed zero punch.
The book kicks off with a Buddhist Minotaur, which could’ve been incredibly funny, but that scene was downplayed, and its humor felt forced. There are also dragons looking for a book, a shape-shifting werewolf FBI agent who talks like a complete fucking dolt, a suspicious “regular” friend who suddenly knows magic but no one really questions it (spoiler alert: he's the bad guy), dead parents that the main character doesn’t seem very shaken up about aside from him telling the reader he’s shaken up (and then going on a Scotch binge with the people left to run the business and fawning all over the tits of the woman in charge), a massive inheritance, a Pepper Potts rip-off who I thought would be the heroine (she was merely eye candy for Nate to mentally jerk off to), and some pathetically un-endearing attempts at snark. There were no effective conflict, goals, or motivation from the “hero,” who was a spoiled, narcissistic twat. World building was sorely lacking. Halfway in, the reader should have had at least some idea of the direction in which the story would move. For all I knew at the midpoint, this could’ve been a book about supernatural pirates on acid because nothing fucking happened.
By far, the worst part of this book is the over-ripe shit-ass main character, Nate Temple. He's a sexist fuck, full of himself, cocky (not in the good way), condescending, and prone to making rude comments about women’s appearances. Nate appraises women like objects. He radiates a look-at-all-my-awesome-magic! vibe like a child desperately vying for attention. There is no explanation for how he uses the magic, how he got it, or where it comes from. He was despicable in every sense of the word, and I hated his guts.
The author's penchant for glossing over plot points and mentioning them after the fact without showing events in real time was another gripe of mine. The focus here was highlighting Nate's look-at-my-personality-and-how-interact-with-people narcissism rather than telling a fucking story.
Narrator Marcio Catalano read like a newscaster with little intonation or emotion other than “upbeat.” I didn’t care for his performance at all.
Overall, Obsidian Son was a boring, narcissistic, sexist mess that probably gives incels a massive hard-on. Fuck you.
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