I felt disappointed with Seven Days Till Mayhem. Let me explain the downfalls.
1 – It is not Sci-Fi or dystopian
2 – Too many characters thrown at the reader
3 – Too many detailed character descriptions
4 – No real protagonist
5 – No real antagonist
6 – Overloaded narrative
But its a dystopian? No, not really. So the jails get unlocked and inmates escape. Yes, it becomes a tragedy, but that will not be the downfall of society. From the heavy hand of government locking things down to society coming to a halt, it is an over-reach. The criminal would be rounded up quickly, not something that would take such a long time that everyone would cower in their homes.
There were too many characters thrown at the reader too quickly. Yes, having characters in the book is important, but when you overload a reader, they loose track of them quickly. Why overload? And the details about each character are dumped on the reader as well. It caused me to wonder why, when the character is only brought in for a short time and then disappears. Or a simple character who could have a paragraph or two of back story, turns out to have more pages of back story than the amount of pages they have in a book!
With no real protagonist, the story ran along introducing and forgetting about characters. And from the start to the end, this was the theme. And the antagonist only appeared nearer to the end with no real understanding of what they did before that. With 3rd person using multiple POV characters (but not done omnipotently), it becomes hard to keep track. The antagonist could have been introduced sooner. But alas, that did not happen.
And while I love a good narrative, this work was overloaded on such. Character interaction suffered from the narrative being over 80% of the book.
In so many ways, this book feels like an off-lance of the TV show Prison Break.
