Review 85: Upgrade

Upgrade by Blake Crouch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

''Upgrade'' is Crouch' third book I've finished and I'm not sure I will read his fourth. Upgrade is not bad per se, but it's also not great. The premise is good, but the execution is lackluster. In a world where anything is possible through gene editing, Crouch does not exceed the level of ''make humans harder, better, faster, stronger''. Whether it is the Marvelisation of pop culture or just plain unoriginal, I don't know, but at no point this the book manage to really hook me. The second reason you might want to skip this one is the pacing and predictability. Early on, you can form an idea of how the rest of the story will unfold. This is the case with many books, but then it's up to the author to surprise you and ''subvert your expectation'' (fill in your D&D/GoT joke here). This simply does not happen here. The story hits all the predictable beats to the predictable end and no unexpected turn has been presented. Lastly, this book is flat. I'm not referring to page numbers, but rather to intensity. Ideally, once the story picks up, so does the pace. The stakes rise and you wonder more and more how the main character will make it out of their predicament alive. As you might be able to guess, Upgrade does not deliver here. At no point is there a serious uptick in intensity. It just plods along until the finish line, like a marathon runner keeping an extremely steady pace of many kilometers, with no obstacles in their way. And just like that would be, in my humble opinion, rather boring to watch, so is this book boring to read.

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