I wanted to like it. (Not how you hope a review will begin.) Loved the main characters Mitzi and Brigit, loved the wild settings, even enjoyed the POV switches for awhile. But what was building into a dystopian science fiction novel with snappy one-liners and some interesting twists devolved into a confusing mess. This is supposed to be a standalone story of charatcers and settings from an ongoing comic so it's possible it's just not as standalone as it needs to be for me, but I charged into it interested and left confused and a little disappointed. I might check out the comics, though.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

this book ...was a mess.. i seriously considered giving it one star but i am willing to concede that perhaps i would have understood this book better if i had read the others set in the same universe. although the author claims this is a standalone book so really it shouldn't matter.

the first half of this book was just completely confusing. i could not figure out what was going on. it seemed like author had just taken a bunch of random comic book references and american culture from the 40s / 60s and jumbled them all together along with a lot of british and sometimes australian slang. and none of this worked as any kind of cohesive world building - it literally just felt randomly and jarringly thrown together.

then in the middle of the novel we find out 'why'. the entire world is this video game that lee [one of the characters, or should i say eight of the characters because oh yeah he split himself into eight people in the game because *obscure comic reference*] made to hold the consciousness of a dead girlfriend or something? and he literally just threw in any random inspiration thing he wanted. which fine that is probably how some random guy would make a video game, but it still doesn't make for interesting reading. and we get a whole chapter explaining this [probably the longest chapter of the book]. and by 'explaining' i mean he just lists a ton of comics and books he likes and ripped off into this game.

and then after that big reveal ...nothing really happens? i mean at one point a character named brigit is trying to kill mitzi [the main character] for ...whatever reason. but she just disappears about 2/3 of the way through and we never know what happened to her. and then 6 of the 8 lees are trying to mess up the city and mitzi and the other lee are going to try to stop them but then the story just ...ends? i was like surely there is supposed to be a sequel but it says finis but it is at best a cliffhanger and at worst a totally incomplete story. also like are all the superhero characters other people from the 'real' world? nothing is explained adequately in this book

to top it off, i just hated the writing style. there were TONS of sentence fragments everywhere and while i know it was a stylistic choice i still found it very hard to read. someone in another review thought that maybe they didn't like it because they don't really like comics, but i do like comics and still thought this was awful. it wasn't so much of an homage as much as a weird jumbled sub-par rip-off where the author apparently just wanted to name drop all the 'obscure' comic stuff that he knows. awful.

Sassy manga-style characters and noir attitude makes this a fun read.