Thank you for the arc, unfortunately I did not finish it, I just wasn't the right audience for this book.

This is a difficult book to read, because the writing is dreadfully clunky. It took me two weeks to trudge through this story, and I found myself wishing that I’d called it quits and DNF’d as soon as I started having trouble at the 10% mark.

The prologue of We Are Watching is the strongest part of the story. We meet an astronaut who is in mortal peril, experiencing the catastrophic failure of his ship, but who is desperate to get home to his wife and child. I flew through this part of the story and found myself eager to continue, wanting to see what would happen next to the intrepid explorer.

Sadly, after the prologue we instead follow the astronaut’s son, Trainee Henry “Hank” Malone, and the bulk of the novel fails to live up to the brilliance of the prologue. Because the first few scenes are so intensely focused there is a great sense of atmosphere and emotion, but the larger world that surrounds Henry is poorly crafted and incoherent. Characters are referred to by multiple different names in an unnatural way – I kept thinking two or three people were being referred to, rather than just one person – and none of them have any memorable qualities. In fact, it’s only been a month since I finished this book and I’m already struggling to remember names or descriptions for any of the characters, as they just don’t have any impact at all.

The same can be said about the world. Whereas some dystopians have very unique settings (Divergent and The Hunger Games being two which pop to mind), We Are Watching has some interesting aspects but they are brushed over too easily. The idea of people getting money through shares and likes is a great piece of social commentary – taking the way that people are so obsessed with getting validation through social media and twisting it into a currency is genius! – but this is never explained or explored thoroughly. Sometimes dropping your reader in the deep end and refusing to simply explain your world works brilliantly, but other times it makes it impossible to get to the bottom of what’s really going on, and sadly We Are Watching falls in the latter camp.

I try not to judge galleys too harshly for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors that may be scattered throughout, as they aren’t finished copies and often contain errors, but I wouldn’t be surprised if We Are Watching was a first draft which had received no editing at all. As well as the characters and the world being rather flat, the action sequences were awfully described, making it impossible to picture anything that was going on. I found myself rereading paragraphs to try to get to the bottom of what the heck had just happened, only to end up shrugging and continuing on with the story because it still made no sense to me. Reading shouldn’t be this much of a mental workout!

I’m not quite sure why there needs to be a sequel as everything seemed as though it could have been neatly wrapped up, but this won’t be a series that I end up continuing.