Starter Villain

Spoilers ahead!

I imagine this will be pretty meandering because I don't actually know how to write a review of a book, but hey, that's one of the things I'll be learning here.

This was a fun read! Quite a short book, and an easy read. It follows the journey of a guy who inherits his late uncle's villainous empire, complete with secret(ish) volcano lair.

I found the pacing to be nice: the book starts off at a crawl, painstakingly laying out what a disastrous and empty life our unwilling hero has. We learn that he's lost his career, his sposue left him, his father just died, he's broke, he's trying to buy a bar that it's made very clear he's not going to get the loan for, and even if he did, he has no experience running a bar anyway. The guy is fucked. But from there, things pick up steam pretty quickly, to the point where it doesn't feel jarring that the whole thing wraps up in like ten pages. (I originally wrote "two" here, but went back to check, which I guess reinforces that it felt like things happened very quickly at the end, which I think matters more than the actual page count.)

Another thing I think the book did well is that I spent about 2/3 of the book kind of irritated that we spent all of this time talking about buying some bar in Charlie's hometown, and it did not seem very likely that we were ever going to talk about that again. Imagine my delight when, as most people who aren't me probably could have anticipated, Charlie ends up owning the bar after all. Everything wraps up quite neatly.

I didn't find many of the characters super memorable, but maybe that wasn't really the point?

Oh, also, there are intelligent cats who spy on people and can use computers, and class-conscious dolphins. So there's that.