Buzz Kill

A Novel

By: David Sosnowski

Narrated by: Lauren Ezzo

Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

"Along with the almost satirical rendering of the world, the lovely writing, and engaging plot, the characters of George and Pandora are brilliant." --Booklist

Pandora Lynch lives in Alaska with her single dad, an online therapist for Silicon Valley's brightest and squirreliest. Homeschooled by computer and a self-taught hacker, Pandora is about to enter high school to learn how to be normal. That’s the plan at least.

NorCal runaway George Jedson is a hacker too - one who leaves the systems he attacks working better than before. After being scooped up by a social media giant, will George go legit - or pull off the biggest hack ever? Not even his therapist knows for sure, but maybe the headshrinker's daughter....

After meeting in cyberspace, the two young hackers combine their passions to conceive a brainchild named BUZZ. Can this baby AI learn to behave, or will it be like its parents and think outside the box?

With a hilarious and deeply empathetic narrative voice, this elegiac and unapologetically irreverent novel is both humorous and tragic without ever taking itself too seriously.

©2020 David Sosnowski (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Hell of a fun ride through the new and old

This work is full of highs, lows, laughter and more. It's at once satire and then twists on you to make you question your love and addiction to technology and how to balance that upon reality, however you decide to define it at the time being. Memory is a funny thing in this work. As are the tropes getting subverted and re-examined.

Without giving it away, you know what you're going to get as this work jumps genres and POVs even while staying is a traditional 3rd party stance. Lauren Ezzo is in top form here and really brings each character, large and atom sized to life.

Lets make money off of mental disorders

Not even about SciFi, Long winded diatribe about mental disorders and old people. I could not even get through a quarter of this book it is so bad. Tried to return it but for some reason Audible would not let me, thinking about quitting Audible over books like this.

No very good

I only like the parts where Pandora was either talking to her father or her grandmother. The rest I could have done without, very boring 😴☹️

Kind of a waste of time.

This novel starts quite promising. A mystery is instantly set, a couple of interesting characters are introduced and the way the author describes stuff through analogies is cute. Unfortunately, it really doesn't last long, as every single positive element the novel introduces quickly wears out its welcome.

The mystery set at the start shows no sign of even being set up until a subtle possibility shows up in the last quarter of the book that indicates the path the story is going to take. And then another mystery is introduced and never solved. Characters that started quirky and interesting quickly devolve into pretentious, politically obsessed creeps whose preachiness might be more welcome if they didn't turn out to be such terrible people themselves, and despite being constantly treated as geniuses by the author and themselves they constantly decide to act like dunces. Plus, it becomes patently obvious that the author's penchant for long analogies serves no other purpose than padding.

Oh, yes, padding. That is definitely the major issue with the book. There are many excessively long scenes that serve absolutely no purpose, made worse by the author's insistence on taking the proverbial scenic route when it comes to describing actions and thoughts. The fact that the two protagonists don't even get to meet until two thirds into the book is a problem, but the fact that the plot only effectively starts about three quarters in is an even bigger one.

At some point I started zoning out during certain parts and it's quite telling that I literally slept through entire chapters and I never felt like I had missed anything. At no point I felt confused by the plot and never thought I needed to go back to see if I had missed anything. The plot is quite simplistic and the whole story could easily be cut to a 2-3 hour affair rather than the 14-hour actual duration by simply making the excessive descriptions more concise and removing every unnecessary scene. And it'd still feel like it was padded.

It also seems like the author believes himself to be more clever than he actually is. He certainly doesn't reach Dan Brown levels of lack of research, but he still doesn't know as much about "nerdy" subjects as he seems to believe. Characters behave in the ways that cheap pop culture tends to represent them, not in particularly realistic ones. Using the phrase "The Turing Test" a few dozen times doesn't make the story any smarter, and I guarantee you most nerds don't idolize Edison the way these characters do.

It also appears that this story is actually a prequel for another book from the same author titled "Happy Doomsday". It doesn't really feel like a prequel, but maybe the story benefits more from reading the other book before. If that's the case, it can't be by much, since the majority of this novel is dedicated to detail the increasingly creepy hijinks of the two protagonists, Pandora and George, who aren't listed as characters in "Happy Doomsday". I didn't read that book, so there's a chance they might show up at some point, but the way this story describes them it's clear the author expects the reader to not be familiar with them, so I doubt it. There doesn't seem to be any positives or negatives regarding this novel's connection to the other one, so take that how you will.

About the narration, it's alright. The narrator does a reasonable job of making most main characters sound unique, though she struggles with a few, particularly since her trick to make adult male voices is to make them talk at a slower pace. You get used to it later, but at first they sound like the slow playback Kevin Macallister uses in Home Alone 2 to fool everyone in the movie and no one in the audience, and also sometimes it's hard to tell one male character from the other when they're having a conversation. That aside, her voice does a very good job of narrating with energy, without any undecipherable accent or word slurring, and it's easy to understand.

I can't really recommend this book. I only really pushed through the end because I don't like leaving books unfinished. Frankly, it feels like a severely watered down cheap soda that not only loses its flavor with the excessive amount of water put there to fill the bottle, but also didn't taste any good to begin with. Removing this book's padding would make the story more easy to digest, but it wouldn't solve the problems with the cliche story or the bad characters.