Let me set the scene: I need to be out of the house for a few hours, so I wander aimlessly around the library. I see this book standing up on a shelf, and pick it up despite the author. I read it all in that one sitting.

It's not that it's a good novel by any means, but I enjoyed it, in a campy-silly-trainwreck kind of way. Brain popcorn with lots of twists (seriously, so many twists). I don't think invested is quite the right word, but I was very much along for the ride.

The beginning is bad. It reads a little clattery and jerky, just kind of disjointed. The prose is not smooth. I don't know why I kept on with it. I was pleasantly surprised by the pictures? Which are also not great works of art; I checked when this book was published to see if they might have used AI to generate the images (2017, so I don't think so). It's fun that they're there, reminded me of the Great Illustrated Classics that were in my school library when I was a kid.

The pacing is wonky. Sometimes it seems to linger, but it also feels like it rushes past details like a car on the freeway. There were so many opportunities to flesh out the world. The whole thing is left feeling bland and empty. Also, sometimes there's a jarring shift between "chapters," they don't flow well and it feels like it was written by a different person (which I know is likely, but it definitely could have been edited better).

Now let's get to the story stuff. The names! They're so silly. I got used to them fast, but I couldn't find any kind of logic to them. Our main character is called Six,

all the humans are named after some kind of riff on the serial numbers that the Hu-Bots gave them

. Six is kind of a meh character at the beginning. I get that not every protagonist has to be a badass-hero-leader type, but she doesn't seem to have anything at all to her. (At least make her firm in her cowardice. She goes along with Dubs too often to even have that going for her. She's not even a pushover, she's more like a pull-along. Later she gets a little bit of "character," but even that just feels like two-dimensional stereotypical angsty rebellious apocalypse girl.)

The Hu-Bots (this is the worst thing they could have called them I think. It sounds so dumb.) seem to have

some kind of family name thing going on? I didn't understand why some of them seemed to be called by their "first" and "last" names all the time, while some of them occasionally were called by only their "first" name

. Also, another nitpick about the Hu-Bot characters' names:

MikkyBo? What even? And more importantly, how come she calls her younger sister Kitty Kat? They seem like they don't even know what cats are. And I don't think it makes sense for the character.

There's no internal consistency in the jargon for the world or for each character's vocabulary (because we headhop quite a bit). Here's a line from Six early in the book: "It's cramped and grungy over there, with big, ugly signs for H-RR (restrooms), H-L (lodging), and H-E (eats)." And then towards the end of the book, one of the higher up Hu-Bots uses the word "bathroom." It throws any immersion out the window.

One last jab at this whole mess: a lot of the story relies on the reader being a person in the world; being able to fill in the blanks with sci-fi tropes and stock images, having a basic framework for these sorts of stories, knowing what Disneyland is (yes, Six mentions it by name).

I know that hoping for better than everything listed above is probably asking a lot from a James Patterson book, and that's on me. I hate that this is part of the James Patterson Literary Universe Brand™, because I kind of like this book. I think it has good bones, buried deep, deep, deep down (but maybe that's just because I'm a sucker for sci-fi). There were a few good lines, and they weren't just pointless zingers. Some of the sentences could survive another round of editing. 

There's a few other things I want to mention. First, I wasn't expecting to

casually encounter a clumsily handled transgender drag performing robot in a James Patterson book

. It's not the worst thing in the world, it's just kind of stumbled over and then glossed over for the rest of the book? Second, to this book's credit,

it doesn't do the most obvious forced romance. I think it handles Six and Dubs' relationship as well as it can for two very flat characters

. Third, it feels like most of the descriptions of Mikky are, for lack of a better term,

Stupid Sexy Flanders. Which culminates in Six and Mikky having what I really thought was a romantic moment on the very last page. I'm shocked, and a little appalled, they didn't kiss.