Gunslinger Girl by Lindsay Ely (and technically JAMES PATTERSON PRESENTS) Book Review

Rating: 2 out of 5 bastards

SIR PEACHY G. HARRISON PRESENTS: Gunslinger Girl ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm kidding, this is actually a JAMES PATTERSON PRESENTS book.

Summary and Review All- In- One: Gunslinger Girl is a 2018 post-apocalyptic dystopian book by Lyndsay Ely (and James Patterson) where the United States has gone through some second civil war and now people live in government...outpost...commune...thingys. Unless they live in the [gasp] LAWLESS WASTELAND. Why did the U.S. have a second civil war? Hell if I know. And hell if our protagonist, Serendipity Jones, knows. I'm gonna break for a minute here to articulate a specific complaint. You know when you're watching something or reading something and there's a character being held hostage. And your main character is like...behind some shelves, watching the standoff. They're armed, the kidnappers are armed, the cockroaches are armed and everything's tense. The kidnappers don't know our protagonist is there, so our protagonist has the high ground. They can do anything. Snipe the kidnappers. Create a distraction. Do a dance. Anything in the world. But what do they do instead? They... sit there. They think real hard about what they should do,,,while sitting there. The kidnappers are giving an evil villain monologue to the victim which gives our protagonist so much time and they still. Do. Nothing. Then the kidnappers, robbers, whoevers, shoot the victim dead. Big dead. And all of sudden, our protagonist, who was SO hesitant a second ago, comes running out and handles business. WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT EXACTLY 26 SECONDS BEFORE??!! I just don't understand this trope and I keep encountering it in books (like Tris at the end of Divergent). I also keep encountering it in tv and movies too. I fuckin' hate it. Get your ass into gear or get lost in the sauce. Anyway, in case you couldn't tell, the above happens pretty immediately in Gunslinger Girl. Our main character, Serendipity, known as ,,,Pity,,, lives at a kinda lawless outpost. Her father is very mean and she's planning on running away when she turns 18 with her best friend Finn. Finn is a perfect character who's like... very much lesbian- coded or baited or whatever because who even fuckin' knows these authors' intentions anymore. Anyway, due to how perfect she is, I knew she would die. I just didn't know when. Turns out it's on page 69. No really it is. I couldn't make that up. Pity, who is already being alluded to as being extremely fast with guns, hence the title of the book, is watching the kidnapping standoff. She is literally holding two guns, one in each hand, watching this shit. Pity is also on a hill, hidden from the robber's view,  with the high ground vantage point over them. For some reason, Pity sits her ass there trying to read Finn's signals and shit until the people just shoot Finn. Big dead. ONLY THEN does Pity come running out, GUNS ABLAZIN', shooting wildly and SCREAMING. It was at this moment that I had to put the book down, which then caused me to notice a couple on the bus who were wrapped around each other like pretzels. Anyway. That scene really sets the tone of what to expect from Gunslinger Girl. After Pity goes wild, goes stupid, the robbers blow up everything. Her injured ass gets found by some folks who are going to the LAWLESS WASTELAND. The folks include a quirky white dude she will probably fall in love with, a mean black lady and a Hispanic leader dude. You know he's Hispanic because every sentence he says a random Spanish word. Pity thinks long and hard about how she caused Finn's death so she's at least genre-savvy enough to know she fucked up. We also get her musings about the second civil war that happened years earlier as they chug along to Lawlessville. The descriptions of the war are really unclear and involve words like PACIFIC EVENT and CONFEDERATION. And you're left wondering: How did we get here? She immediately starts falling for artist dude Max and gazing into his eyes and being calmed by his touch, so, uh, yeah. They then arrive to Lawless City and it's basically just New York. Manna Hatta baybee! They then get to a big fancy building with guards called Tin Men and it's here that I began to notice the world building was abysmal. Just no sense of time, place or direction. There's a Big Bad Lady who runs VegasYork. Pity proves herself as the rootinest, tootinest sharpshooter to the Big Bad Lady and gets put in a literal circus. That's on brand because this book was pure clownery luv.

The book continues to have random references that don't make a lot of sense, like...many more Wizard of Oz references. Pity continues on in this circus which is also apparently the town court.  We know this because her first night in the circus, the audience CONDEMNS a man to Death By Snake Charmer. So now you know Pity is gonna have to make the hard decision to kill somebody later on in the book. It'll probably be Max with the way things are going. The books continues to throw random references haphazardly like 4- year olds playing wiffleball. On one hand, we've got  Hunger Games-ish things, such as: folks and buildings named after Roman and Greek stuff, surely symbolizing the decadence of the lawless wasteland. Then right next to all that stuff are things named Eden and other biblical references so... who knows. The book continues on at that pace and never finds its footing at all. I'm gonna have to give this a 2 revolvers outta 5 pearl handles. It ain't the worst book I ever read but it sure ain't the best out in these here parts. At the end of the day, it's still better than anything James Patterson could have written.