Item 16 - Finish 30 6 books - "Extinction Point" by Paul Antony Jones

(Source)

Oh boy. I'll just get this over with quickly; I didn't like this book. I had a lot of reasons but one of the primary ones is the protagonist, Emily. Emily is your typical reader stand-in character in that she is essentially a blank slate personality. This is even more unfortunate than you might expect since she is essentially the only "character" (and I use that word loosely here) that we are exposed to for most of the book. The one part of her personality that does make it into the plot is that she is incredibly genre blind.

It's one thing if a story never makes mention of a genre; I'm willing to accept, for instance, in "Friday the 13th" that the teens have never seen a slasher movie in their life, maybe in their universe that particular type of fiction doesn't exist and therefore it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do to split up and go into the basement by themselves. This is not the case with Emily; she explicitly states she's a fan of zombie movies and that a sci-fi movie is playing in the background at one point. And yet she persists in doing everything that you would expect someone with no experience in either subject to do: Hmmm, should I arm myself in case someone/something attacks me? NOPE! Should I find a flashlight before going exploring? Fuck that! What was that strange sound? I'll go investigate!

I think what really gets me is that I think the author is probably a good writer, but it felt like he phoned this in. So much so that nothing actually happens or is resolved by the end of the book. It ends with a non-cliffhanger cliffhanger. It's very obviously designed with  a desire to be a series in mind. You are left with a single character who you don't care about, doing something that doesn't seem to matter and no resolution to any part of it. It could have done so much more, which is it's cardinal sin.