A wiki article masquerading as a book

The book doesn't know what it wants to be. It takes forever to get anywhere or make any points. It ruins any source of tension by making it go on way too long. It makes Baird seem even less likable then ghe original trilogy did. There is a staggering amount of sexism that the book never actually seems to interrogate. In fact it often proves the sexist points the characters have against women. It feels full of filler and then, partway through the story, it then decides to go back in the past and follow a completely different storyline just when the original one was finally starting to move. It goes at a snails pace then finally when it starts to move, it decides to start again and move at an even slower pace in a completely different time period. It feels like a lore dump in order to fill in character backstory for a wiki article. It has over five different points of view *so far*.

The games did a great job of the characters and their backstorys. We didn't need a point of view from Bairds mother from years and years earlier. What we needed was what happened between Gears 2 and 3. But thats taken a backseat to the Pendulum wars. These should have been two different books. Then at least the filler may have been tolerable. Two books of filler in two completely different storys is unbearable. Even if they needed to have the backstory of a random town, they could have at least alternated the chapters. But slamming the brakes of one story for a completely different one is ridiculous and assumes you are interested enough in that period to continue reading it but not enough you would buy a separate book about it. This book doesn't know what its doing or what it's trying to say. Are we supposed to like the Stranded or not? Are we supposed to like the COG or not? Is the author trying to say women aren't supposed to be in war because the book sure keeps saying that. Its not a book it's a slow lore dump on stuff you don't want to know and ignores the stuff you do. It assumes you haven't played Gears 3 at all so won't see the twist from a mile away.

I wouldn't recommend this book unless you have extreme patience or are extremely interested in the ins and outs of looking for a job as a struggling farmer during the Pendulum wars. I thought learning about human and brute politics in Halo was hard to get through, but at least that book didn't pretend to be something completely different and actually got to the point eventually. This somehow managed to have too much and not enough happening all at once.

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