Rachel (Kalanadi)'s Reviews > Company Town

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sadly, I wasn't impressed with Company Town. I've been looking forward to this book for about 2 years and it turned out to be not really the type of story I enjoy these days, and it had problems with pacing and transitions and overall knitting the story parts together.

Hwa is a half-Korean woman who works as a bodyguard. She was born with a syndrome that leaves her with a disfigured face, a large birthmark stain, and a tendency for seizures. She is also a rare person who hasn't been gene-tweaked or augmented with implants: she's all organic and can't be hacked. Because of this, Hwa is offered a job protecting a rich, powerful man's teenage son Joel who has been receiving death threats. Then, Hwa's friends from the sex worker union start showing up dead, and Hwa is trying to figure out whether she, Joel, or the women are the real intended targets...

This story was a mishmash of Hwa's bodyguard job and the serial killer plot, and it never 100% gelled for me. I was *thoroughly* confused by the final few chapters, the reveal of the bad guy, and the overall resolution. I had to use the search function on my Kindle to find where the bad guy was first mentioned, because I couldn't remember who he was...and I read most of this book in a single afternoon.

I feel like Company Town has a great gritty setting, interesting points about organic versus augmented bodies, and such potential for the characters of Hwa and Daniel Siofra. But it was all let down by an unbalanced story with choppy, predictable story beats. Scenes sometimes cut away so abruptly that I thought I had accidentally skipped a page or a paragraph was missing. And as I mentioned, the final few chapters were flat out confusing to me, and what actually happened to certain characters was easy to miss.

So, in summary, this book started out as a very enjoyable (if not amazing) read, I really became immersed in the middle section, but by the end I felt vaguely disappointed.