Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder - Steve S. Saroff - ★★.¼

AUTHOR: Steve S. Saroff

NARRATOR: Steve S. Saroff

GENRE: Literary Fiction.

RATING: 2.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: An ambitious plot but didn’t work for me in terms of characters, pace, or thrills. I did like some elements connected to the plot, but overall, this was disappointing. This is an outlier opinion.

Story Synopsis:

Enzi, a child of immigrants from some unnamed country, is a dyslexic stutterer. After his mom dies of cancer and his alcoholic dad loses his job, Enzi is taken out of his dad’s custody. He runs away at the age of fourteen and begins life as a drifter. Along his journeys, he frequents libraries, where he discovers a passion for maths and coding.

A few years later (we never know the exact timeline), Enzi is a self-taught programmer and has his own software business with a fellow coder named O’Neill. A big company named SLAM purchases their business and recruits them both as high-end executives. Enzi soon ends up doing some illegal work for a person named Tsai, who has his own secret financial agenda for hacking into SLAM’s databases and networks.

While all the above events unfurl, Enzi also meets a Japanese immigrant artist named Kaori, who, while still pining for “the lover of her life”- a guy named Jim, forms a bond with Enzi.

The plot basically involves Enzi’s sorting out whatever mess the others mentioned above make.

The story comes to us from the first person perspective of Enzi.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The setting of Missoula, Montana and how it is used in the plot. The author’s love for nature comes through clearly.

😍 Some wonderful quotes throughout the book. I especially loved the one about lies being like a wobbly wheel.

😍 Enzi’s dyslexia is used quite differently in the story. I liked how the book didn’t turn Enzi into someone to be sympathised with for having the learning disorder. Rather, the author uses his own background as a dyslexic to make us see how Enzi uses patterns to analyse letters and numbers.

😍 I didn’t expect juggling to get such a focus in the plot about hacking. All the juggling-related scenes were entertaining.

😍 The ending is decent. (Though to reach the ending, I needed to have a lot of patience.)

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 As someone from the field, I enjoyed the computer-related elements in the story. The author clearly knew what he was talking about, and made use of his programming knowledge and experience to make the scenes sound convincing. At the same time, the computer explanations get too detailed. While I understand how some info might have been needed for readers who don’t come from a computing background, the manner in which the technological elements were written made it feel more like a computer teacher’s explanation in a beginner’s computing class. It didn’t flow naturally in the plot.

😐 The book has many interesting characters, right from the ultra-successful runaway Enzi to the mentally-struggling Kaori to the quirky bondsman Pascal and many more. However, the writing didn’t make me connect to a single character, not even to the first person narrator. Some of their relationships form so instantly that I couldn’t even understand how or why the characters came together. For instance, Enzi is ready to pay a huge amount to bail out Kaori just a few days after they first met. Why? No explanation. It just is. Enzi has a tendency to talk on and on at times, like a pompous politician going on about himself, which further distanced me from his narration.

😐 Not sure how I feel about the Asian rep in the book. Kaori’s broken English began to annoy me after a while, especially as it isn’t consistent. Tsai’s portrayal as a Chinese-origin man from Texas was somewhat better. But a suicidal/morbid Japanese and a criminal-minded Chinese felt too clichéd, though I appreciated one line where the narrator talks of Tsai being from Texas and thus being more Texan than Chinese.

Bookish Nays:

😒 Many facts that could have added to our experience are skipped over. We never know how old Enzi is when he began his company. We know his parents were immigrants but never know where they came from. We know Enzi ran away when he was fourteen, but where did he run away from – foster care or an orphanage? Did he ever try to get back to his father in the interim period? How did he go from maths to coding? The background stays fuzzy till the end.

😒 The pacing is extremely unsteady, and to add to it, the narration goes back and forth across timelines (with no mention of the timelines.)

😒 The story takes ages to get going. The first one-two chapters held my attention but after that, the plot seems stuck in a loop until the final 10% or so. There were so many times when I wondered, “Where the heck is he going with this?” I was on the verge of giving up on the book multiple times, and had this not been an audio copy, I would have probably DNFed it.

😒 This is advertised as a literary thriller but I found it more like literary fiction. The thrills come only in the final segments of the book. The rest is more of a slow-paced glimpse into complex characters.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, narrated by the author himself, clocks at 10 hrs 13 min. It took me a while to get used to his voice for Enzi, but he handles the reading decently. There aren’t any distinct voices for the characters but those attuned to audiobooks should find the audio version easy-going.

I would suggest changing the name of the first chapter from "Helen", because when I heard “Chapter 1: Helen” and the narration began in 1st person, I assumed it was Helen doing the talking. It took a few minutes before I realised that the first person narration was by someone named Enzi.

For a debut work, the book handles some complex topics and brings forth some intricate characters. However, a little bit more fine-tuning of the story flow and plugging in the gaps in the character backstories and their behavioural motivations would have made this a better experience for me.

That said, every single one of my Goodreads friends has rated this highly, so I am very much the exception to the norm. Kindly go through their reviews to see if this could work better for you.

My thanks to Flooding Island Press for a complimentary audio copy of “Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

The book is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.