Only Human (Themis Files 3)

Hi everyone! This is a quick post of an older review. WriteBot wishes to make this blog a bit more active again and will mostly be reviewing great fiction and non-fiction!

Here it goes:

I finished Only Human a day after it came out and have to say I'm quite disappointed with the book. I've read all three of the series (of course), and I truly liked the first two, but I would not recommend anyone else to waste money on this volume. Better leave it at two, even if it's a cliffhanger.

The setup in book one and two was great. They were well organized and I tore through them in a day each at work. I pre-ordered Only Human immediately after finishing the first and the second book. Only Human, however, turned out to be a great and uninspired mess. It turned its back on all the great first-contact themes the previous volumes promised and turned into a long moral rant that ended in a somewhat deus-ex-machina climax.

Here are some of the issues I have with this last installment:

The main characters. They deteriorated heavily after the last (second) book. There's Rose, who basically turned into a whiny emo and blamed everything on herself but at the same time on everyone else too, and her solution to the whole plot was basically 'you aliens did this, you have to solve it'. There's no theme or character growth or anything that connects this book's Rose with the other two volumes. Basically, in her view, it's all the aliens' fault, and while that might theoretically be true, the resolution of the series was very anti-climactic and disappointing.

Then there's Eva, who's just an insufferable brat, and not at all strong like Kara. All she does, too, is whine and do nothing to support the plot. In the second book, when the reader is introduced to Eva, it seems as if she has a huge part to play, and her character is built up very well, with the mystery surrounding her visions and so on, and even the ending of the book promises in some way that the next one will be even better and Eva will be very important. But she isn't. She's ignorant, she's angry, and she's quite a pest. She is not likeable at all, and I didn't find her very intelligent either.

I don't have much to say about Vincent.

The other big issue is that there was hardly any plot and the resolution of this pseudo-plot was so far from anything the series promised it was sad to see it. It reads very much as if Sylvain Neuvel simply ran out of things to say and original content to put into this book. I really really enjoyed the first two, because there was life to them, and mystery, and everything made inherent sense (well not everything, but you get what I mean), but in this last installment Neuvel seems to have run completely out of steam. The themes are redundant and often whole conversations are repeated to put a more emo spin on them, and morals are discussed when there's no reason at all these characters should be thinking about such things. The first 20% of the book especially are essentially repetitions. First a scene from this character's view, then the exact same scene or event from another's, and nothing really happens. This, unfortunately, drags through the whole book, and nothing much happens throughout the rest of it.

I'm not sure what I expected, but I had high hopes considering the series had such a great great start. However, Only Human was a complete waste of paper and money.