Skyler White

Let me be honest: I’m a fan of Steven Brust. I like his complex world-building, his characters and his willingness to integrate challenging issues of race and class (and occasionally gender) into his writing. Unfortunately, while I was predisposed to love The Incrementalists, it fell flat for me.

Narrative is first-person, shifting between Phil and Renee, often multiple times in the same chapter. Someone decided to use some pretty cursive typeset to head the sections with “Phil” or “Ren,” and to my (apparently) aging eyes, sometimes I had to look twice to verify who I was reading. You should infer, then, that there was a problem in characterization, that I needed to consciously identify narrator when the options are a two-thousand year old personality who is currently a male poker player living in Vegas or a thirty year-old single female program designer with a penchant for telling people off. Or something. Characterization never really succeed, and worsened when it evolved into mutual longing. Besides Phil and Ren, there’s a group of main Incrementalists (Oskar, Irina and others), the personality that is grafted onto Ren’s, Celeste, and a brief appearance of a couple of Ren’s connections. Celeste is by far the most dimensional; the rest feel like the ‘not-Brad, not-George’ remainder of the team in Ocean’s Eleven.

Continued at:

http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-incrementalists-by-steven-brust/

OR, if you prefer, here:

http://carols.booklikes.com/post/763214/the-incrementalists-

Because that way, it won't ever be deleted.… (more)

An interesting premise for a group of people who live effectively forever while integrating new bodies every lifetime, but the story didn't live up to the idea. Felt like someone had read about Memory Palaces and decided to write a book around the idea. Also, several of the relationships were written declaratively rather than descriptively -- "telling-not-showing" -- which made the emotional relationships read as superficial and unmotivated.

Too bad: I have generally liked Steven Brust's work.… (more)

Overall, I wasn't wowed by this. I think I may go back & listen again later - the narrators were good, but the story wasn't what I was expecting, so that may have colored my impression of it. Maybe I'm too pedestrian in my tastes, but when I read a summary about new inductees into an ancient secret society, I expect the traditional Harry Potter structure, and that's what this book was missing for me. The story of the Incrementalists' crisis was okay, but I didn't care that much because I didn't really feel like I knew who the Incrementalists were. It's basically Harry Potter without Hogwarts.… (more)