My jaw is on the floor at how this has received such universal acclaim across every platform and major outlet in the country. This is one of the most annoying, frustrating, pretentious, amateurish books I have ever read. I could keep going with a long list of adjectives, but then I would be as overwrought as this book.
Martyr! is a book with a lot of ideas, most of which are explored with little or surface-level depth. The writing is stuffed with self-indulgent prose, similes, and metaphors, most of which are so mind-numbingly stupid that I can only assume the author’s editor was in a coma while this was being published. There are so many unnecessary details included in the writing that made me audibly shout “who cares!” so often that I now have a noise complaint filed against me. All of the characters sounded the same; even characters who are real people or well-defined preexisting characters use the same annoying pseudo-intellectual language as our protagonist and the narrator.
This was the most cliché, corny book I have read this year (and likely in the last few years). It’s like a draft from an ENGL Creative Writing 201 class came to life, escaped the halls of academia, and won the lottery to become one of the “it” books from the last year. I beg this author to return to writing poetry, the industry to stop awarding first-draft books that do the minimum to explore form, and the person who read the audiobook to return to performing in soap operas.
1/5