Mini book review: NEED by Joelle Charbonneau

I received an ARC ebook from Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.

What if social media could be used for something evil? That's the problem "NEED" addresses, and it works. The novel grabbed my attention all the way to the end. However, the big reveal lacked motivation and broke my suspense of disbelief. For that, I dropped half a star.

The numerous POVs were difficult to track at first, but it gets better as the novel progresses. I appreciated how well the writing was, as each one of the POVs had a unique voice, a very difficult thing to achieve.

Overall, an attention grabbing, fast paced thriller with a good--not great--ending.

Excellent--4.5 out of 5 stars.

Writing vs Programming: The Neverending Cycle

Writing novels is like coding applications: Write a first lame draft, work on drafts--make it better and more compact, and then "test."

The result of the testing--beta-reading for novels--shows mind-twisting problems that require lots of thinking and patience to solve. So there you go, feeling Superman, fixing, cutting, adding, not wanting to "kill your babies." The new draft is the coolest thing ever, right? So clean, ready to go to the customer or to query the agents. But fixing also implies breaking. As a rule, massive changes break other stuff.

And there you go with more testing.
And more fixes.
And more testing.
And ... and ... you feel like puking.
Can't go through it once more.

This test cycle repeats forever because "there's always one more bug, one more problem." So, no such thing as a perfect novel or app.

There, I said it.