Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes

 

I read this book last night, but things and reasons conspired to keep me from posting about it until now. It's not a horrible book--the prose and the pacing are reasonably good--but it's not a very good one, either: Ms. Barnes spends like the first half of the book writing around things in her main character's past, and in the setting, rather than writing about them; she's holding them back for reveals, which ... well, isn't a thing I'm very fond of, at best, and seems kinda clumsy, here. There are some characterizations that stick and work pretty well, there are others that don't, some of those are for the same characters. The science in the book ... well, let's just say it has (or seems to have) some severe plausibility problems. There are some politics floating around in the book, both in the text and the subtext, that I tend to agree with, but some of the handling ends up feeling a little graceless. There are some interesting ideas, but the execution is not what it probably should have been. Oh, well.