all souls lost

all souls lost by dan moren

I couldn’t help but cringe as I read this book. Maybe it’s just too close to me? It’s ostentatiously set in Boston, it’s very much written by an Apple fan (for goodness sake, the sheer willpower and integrity of the ghost of Steve Jobs saves the day, which…yikes), which are both traits that could describe me, but all they did in the book was make me wince. I don’t think there was anything about the story particularly served by being set in Boston (and it had to involve a sort of magical thinking that transports Apple’s headquarters to the suburbs of Boston, which just doesn’t make sense), I didn’t really feel like it engaged with the decision to have a black protagonist in Boston, and the whole magical founder thing just set my teeth on edge.

I like the genre exercise - a good urban fantasy book is a guilty pleasure for me, but I think it suffers a bunch from nonspecificity. Not to harp too much on the choice of setting it in Boston, but - there are tech companies in Boston, and they have a unique tenor and flavor. They tend to be of a different era (because the economic circumstances that lead to their founding/rise are different) and/or field (more biomedical, directly tied to MIT or one of the other universities, something that grounds them uniquely to the area) than the California tech companies. Copy and pasting what is clearly Apple and dropping it into Boston doesn’t make sense. It might benefit from a series (it seemed to be gearing up that way) and maybe those are all “book one jitters”, but I had a tough time getting beyond them here.