I’ve had an advanced reading copy of The Troop sitting on my reading devices since last fall. It’s probably fair to say that I’ve misused the entire purpose of Netgalley’s project by waiting until a couple of months after the book was released to actually read it. So, um, my apologies to the people who set that up and possibly to the author who, were this going to be a favorable review, might have lost out on literally ones of avid readers as a result?

I can’t decide if I’m being unfair. I know that my most negative impressions of the book were early on, when I hadn’t gotten used to the weird random capitalization errors and other iffy editing that I’ve never seen in physical ARCs I’ve gotten before, in used bookstores or whatnot. But I really don’t think that’s all it was. Which, to explain more, I should probably talk about the book. See, these Canadian boy scouts head off to a small island somewhere off the coast of, um, Canadia, where they can live out their various Breakfast Club stereotypes in nature. And that would have worked out the same way as it always does, I guess, with some fire building and some rock throwing and some hiking marching songs and whatnot, except for the extremely hungry gentleman in the speedboat who lands on the island a few hours later, and the apparently-Canada-has-a-navy quarantine blockade of the island that quickly follows.

You can see why I was into that premise, I’m sure. The execution, though… here’s what it looks like happened, although if you’d asked me, I would have said that the entire purpose of an editor is to prevent something like this. It seems like the author got better over the course of the book. The characters (well, the ones who were still alive) got incrementally more, you know, real, and the plot got tighter and more tense, and by the end it felt like a pretty interesting story had happened, but man, that rocky start. I’m really not convinced I’d have gotten past 10%[1] if I hadn’t felt guilty about running late. Which, in retrospect, is a pretty dumb way to look at it, since I would have felt obligated to put out an honest pre-release review if I’d read it on time, and should have taken the opportunity to not care since I waited too long anyway.

Plus maybe they fixed the first third of the story in post?

[1] Page numbers are weird in the future.