The Unbroken

This one wasn't a quick read for me, not that it's terribly long (between 400 and 500 pages), but that it felt like work getting through it. I had it on my TBR's in an effort to read all of this year's Nebula Award nominees for best novel. The cover had me excited thinking "this is gonna be an excellent epic fantasy". Fantasy? Yes. Excellent? Not really. The story and plot are okay, but sadly, regurgitations of stories you've probably already read many times, but repackaged with many strong female characters. The problem is, all of the female characters feel like the same character with slightly different aesthetics - a gimpy leg here, a missing arm there. All very flat. All not very likable. I was unable to care what happened to any of them because they all seemed to be bad people. Not like anti-hero bad, just bad and poorly written. This book is a socio-political lecture that I didn't need, and it extinguished any sparks of fun reading that started to develop at would-be exciting or entertaining parts of the novel. It was also a bit of a broken record, with scenes and phrases repeated throughout. I don't know how many times there were descriptions of fecal matter mixing with blood and guts anytime someone was killed, but it was a lot, and it was annoying. Unfortunately, the SFWA has lost even more credit with me by their inclusion of THE UNBROKEN in with this year's best novel nominations. I'm sure most of the SFF community would agree that historically, our genres could use more strong women and LGBTQ protagonists and antagonists, but this particular nomination seems to have been based more off of the SFWA's increasingly cliquish political agenda, and less off of actual literary merit. 2/5