Mystery Read - Infinity Son by Adam Silvera

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆

Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆

Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Growing up in New York, brothers Emil and Brighton always idolized the Spell Walkers - a vigilante group sworn to rid the world of specters. While the Spell Walkers and other celestials are born with powers, specters take them, violently stealing the essence of endangered magical creatures.

Brighton wishes he had a power so he could join the fray. Emil just wants the fighting to stop. The cycle of violence has taken a toll, making it harder for anyone with power to live peacefully and openly. In this climate of fear, a gang of specters has been growing bolder by the day.

Then, in a brawl after a protest, Emil manifests a power of his own - one that puts him right at the heart of the conflict and sets him up to be the heroic Spell Walker Brighton always wanted to be. Brotherhood, love, and loyalty will be put to the test, and no one will escape the fight unscathed."

 Man oh man, I feel like I'm on a stretch of less-than-positive reviews, and whenever that happens I'm like am I nitpicking? Do I even really LIKE books? I swear I do! I read books I like too, I promise! I need to do better at taking notes while I read so I can write better positive reviews than just "this book is sooooo good! You have to read it!" But for now, sorry, you're stuck with my string of mediocre books with mediocre reviews.

Reading this book was an interesting experience because the highs were pretty high, and I think that made the lows feel even more low, if that makes sense. There were multiple moments that I thought were incredibly well-written and a handful of reveals that literally made me gasp out loud, and those scenes were fantastic. The trouble was that in between those scenes it was like well...this is fine, I suppose. When I write fiction (that isn't DnD content, because let's be real, a lot of the creative writing I do write now is DnD related), the way I approach it is writing the big milestones first and then going back and filling in from there, and this read like Adam Silvera's approach is similar. 

IS it similar? I obviously have no idea, I don't know Adam Silvera. But the in-between stuff just didn't feel quite as tight as the bigger scenes. A lot of it was kind of repetitive, and there were weird shifts with the characters where they would say one thing, then have like a 180 degree switch in attitude, only to flip right back to the way they were initially acting, all in the space of a page or two. Very jarring. Overall, it read like the big parts of the worldbuilding had been fleshed out and then filling in the blanks happened on the fly and never got polished.

While I didn't dislike reading this, I found it pretty solidly mediocre, which is a bummer because I've liked some of his other stuff. It's the first book in a trilogy, so maybe the smaller storytelling gets better in the second and third books...sadly, I'll probably never know.