#ok first the premise was good and based on true history about the ussr's secret nuclear testing facility City 40
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The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley would be so good if it was good
#i'm gonna have to revive my goodreads account just to leave a bad review AND send 10 million ranting voice messages to my friend tomorrow#ok first the premise was good and based on true history about the ussr's secret nuclear testing facility City 40#the first half of the book had well-written mystery and the atmosphere was truly chilling it was a great cold war era thriller#unfortunately this book has too many flaws and just things that are straight up bad#such as: the mc is an uwuified scientist ex prisoner who GUESS WHAT worked directly under joseph mengele on human experiments???#and it's just like but uwu he was still young and had no choice#well the author had a choice and if you're gonna write something like that at least explore the topic properly????????#oh yeah and an entire prisoner train carriage of women gets raped by all the male prisoner except for valery our heroic mc#who couldn't do anything about it then until he laters kills all of those men with a bomb so he gets a traumatic AND a heroic backstory#and then the love interest: the kgb man with a wife and 4 kids he dearly loves but who conveniently get written off at the end#with no clear resolution as to what actually happened to his family after he defects abroad and he barely even mentions them afterwards????#oh yeah and our mc has some wildly anachronistic sjw-esque tumblr feminisms that the author forced in seemingly to make up for her#treatment of the actual female characters in the book???#the science was sound for the most part except the so-called scientist characters were being STUPID about it#they're like ohhh i wonder what are these weird mud geysers that keep popping off when we're not on volcanic ground#THAT'S THE GODDAMN HEAT FROM THE RADIOACTIVE WASTE AND I KNEW THAT FROM THE FIRST MENTION OF THESE GEYSERS#also the authir doesn't know how russian surnames work and wildly overestimates the amount of coffee that russians drink#and wildly underestimates the alcohol tolerance of 50+ year old bulky kgb officers and doesn't seem to know that the russian language#is gendered. like she writes a whole monologue for valery complaining about being called mister by the english because it's gendered????#also the whole resolution of the book is like a mediocre action thriller airport novel compared to the tense and atmospheric beginning#nah i'm going to sleep. good night
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