No Easy Way Out by Dayna Lorentz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
No Easy Way Out is the sequel to No Safety in Numbers, and god help us, there’s a third book in the series. The first one was terrible. Somehow, this second one was worse. I can only imagine how awful the third one will be. No, scratch that—I don’t think I can imagine that at all. I have post-traumatic stress from reading this. I’ve been through the five stages of grief. I literally had bad dreams while reading this book.
And to think that, in addition to an author, this book had an editor, and a publisher, proof-readers, consulting doctors even. There really are people out there who thing young adults are idiots. I mean, the only people I can think of who would buy this nonsense are the unrealistic, unlikable, uninteresting characters in the book itself.
The book is a muddled mess. It has no semblance of self-cohesion, starting not even on the last page of the prequel, but a few pages before the prequel’s ending. And the ending of No Easy Way Out? It just ends. Like the publishers decided to arbitrarily chop a big fat stack of pages into thirds.
But wait, there’s more mess. Here’s a book for young adults, and so, it can’t say, for example the F-word. Instead, the word “fark” is used. There’s cold-blooded, violent murder, torture, even a scene involving premature ejaculation (no, it’s not a scene written to be humorous), but we can’t harm the teen-reader’s mind with the F-word, can we.
No, instead, we’ll just bludgeon them with stupidity. With situations that would never occur, people saying and doing things they would never do. I’m not talking about people being jerks, I’m talking about wishy-washiness, changes in attitude that follow, at best, the cadence of a new sentence. Whatever’s convenient for the author to create conflict, she puts in. A whole mall shut-down, and somehow there’s a team of security guards with riot gear and stun-batons? A you farking kidding me?
I really don’t know what else to say. This was one of the most difficult reviews for me to write. I might be brain damaged. Don’t read this book.