REVIEW: Three by Jay Posey

Three by Jay Posey
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The book was rude. It threw me into the mix with scant explanation. I waited and waited and when answers were finally given I didn’t understand them because the book didn’t explain what they meant. Characters would act shocked upon awareness and I would just go, “So what?”. The writing spent too much time with scene setup and barely any time with world building. I craved exposition.

For example, Weir were roaming zombie-like monsters. A competent warrior can take one down relatively easily, but the true danger lies within their number and their tendency to ambush preys. Bites wouldn’t necessarily turn a person into a Weir, but then again I’m not sure because the book never explained how one became a Weir. Neither did it explain how Wren came to rule the world when there were powerful humans who could take them on, in groups of course, and reclaim the world for humanity.

As far the book was concerned, the world was always apocalyptic, part of the population always had paranormal abilities, and etc. Unless you were paying close attention and noticed certain words, you wouldn’t have known the fictional world was a futuristic Earth.

+ the characters

Characters were a complete cliché. Three was a strong warrior with a sense of honor. Cass was an ex-criminal who aspired for redemption. Wren, Cass’s son, was a boy with peerless but unreliable power. I bristled how the latter two characters were used for emotional manipulation of the reader. When things needed to vomit sad, the book trotted out the desperate mother and her son who was around 5 year old and cried “Mama,” lip quivering and all that shit. Aiy.

For the main villain, Asher was power crazy because, well, someone got to be evil. The funny thing was that he and the other important characters had more character development than the eponymous hero. I still didn’t know who the fuck Three was by the end of the book. Equally frustrating was the absence of explanation of his secrets when they were revealed. What the fuck does “wired” mean? Ugh. I don’t care anymore.

+ the plot

The plot was so simple that it was strongly more suited as a novella than a novel. I lost patience with it halfway through and heavily skimmed to the end. The only time I ever bothered to pay close attention again was in chapter 22 of 31 when Cass revealed her past and secrets, answers that put her and her son into their present predicament.

The ending was cliché and bittersweet, redolent of some tragic warrior myth. As a reader with a zealotry for happy endings, I would have been upset but I honestly couldn’t give a shit. I never connected with any of the characters so I felt little sadness with the good guys’ death and little joy with the bad ones’.

In Conclusion

I rate Three 1-star for I didn’t like it. A post-apocalypse setting, a touch of cyberpunk, a galore of chase and battle scenes: all that glitters was not gold.

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