Cyberpunk/Sci-fi Book Review: Sleepless Flame

Okay, I promise I’m not falling behind. I’ve got over 100 emails to answer, so for authors still waiting on a reply from me, I just got done processing submissions from March. Hang tight, all right? I have over 50 people in my queue, and I had to rearrange it to add some variety to the various genres I’ve had submitted because I got a glut of epic fantasy and hard sci-fi recently, and I don’t want you wonderful readers to get bored of the same subgenres over and over.

So without further ado, Sleepless Flame[image error] is a cyberpunk-style sci-fi thriller by Odin V. Oxthorn.

It opens with one of the two protagonists, an alien being named Nara dueling with the personified Wind and Rain in one of her dreams. Flash forward to the present, and we see her infiltrating an underground operation which gets our second protagonist, Garett, caught in the crossfire. She rescues him for reasons she doesn’t disclose until far later, and he hires her to be his bodyguard while in the Undercity, a grimy, lightless but for the electric lights strewn about the wreckage, terrible place for seedy criminals and mercenaries to eke out a living.

He agrees to bankroll her missions and play Hawk, or hacker/surveillance, for her escapades.

There isn’t much plot beyond a mission-of-the-chapter style movement until about halfway through, when Nara gets a contract that radically alters their relationship with one another.

I really wanted to love this book. I genuinely did. There are some beautiful passages and fantastic world building, and I would’ve been sucked in if not for the repetitive sentence structures, overuse of the word “as” (over 2800 times throughout the manuscript, often 2-3 times in a single sentence) and lack of a coherent plot until over halfway through. The writing gets better as the story goes along, but I don’t think I would’ve gotten far enough to experience the awesome world building and tech stuff later on if I weren’t reading the book with intent to review.

That said, the cool stuff was incredibly cool, and with a good line editor or critique group and some trimming this book could’ve been really great. The characters (particularly Nara, who is agendered) become a lot more interesting about halfway in as well, and the interaction between the two of them gets more intriguing after the aforementioned fateful escapade. However, I did find the head hopping mid-scene to be a bit confusing, and it happened several times throughout the narrative. I understand that sometimes it might be important to understand the other character’s thoughts, but it’s jarring to jump from one point of view to another mid-scene (and sometimes mid-paragraph) without any real transition.

I think the series has a ton of potential, and I can tell that the author grew a great deal in skill as the book went on. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with later on in their career.

3/5, cool ideas, but bogged down by some sloppy writing and structural issues. Look forward to seeing what Odin comes up with later down the line.