Review: Not up to it's promise but interesting of a type
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 24, 2013
I found this book very difficult to read and evaluate.  I suspect some of that has to do with its genre, which I can only guess at: urban nihilism?Raised by respectable, physician parents, Kyree still chooses the easy path and follows his uncle Vincent into the drug trade.  He seems to be a natural, and he especially likes the access his money gives to lots of women.  The other characters all ultimately make similar choices having to do with money and sex. That seems to be the basis for the mentality of the title here: easy money, easy sex, and interpersonal manipulations of one to get access to the other.What I liked: Mentality was a relatively fast-paced and absorbing read with some good action scenes and few extraneous words.  I especially liked the fight scenes, which were realistic and well done.  The basic premise was somewhat intriguing and the manipulations were easy to follow and generally not forced. I liked the grittiness of some of the dialogue and the fact that some of the characters are street-wise.What didn't work for me: the book didn't match the description. The manipulations involved money and sex - in fact, there was enough graphic sex to disrupt to the pacing after a while (I got the point - they like it, they are good at it, they are driven by it, depending on gender it's their weapon or their downfall) - with nothing really resembling power manipulations other than the sex. Also, there were no `jaw-dropping twist and turns.' What could have been turned into a bit of a psychological thriller dealing with sexual obsession/addiction was hampered by the lack of depth in any of the characterizations.  Far from being complex, the characters were clichés, and instead of growing and evolving, they jumped from one mindset to another with nothing but the shallowest introspection. They are also so uniformly corrupt and lacking in charm that it was hard to care what happened to any of them.SPOILER ALERT:  Expanding upon the deprived background of several of the characters might have made their motivations more credible. Unfortunately, since he was raised by legitimately prosperous parents and there is no mention of abuse, Kyree is even less sympathetic than he might have been otherwise. He chose his immoral lifestyle. Of the women, Natalie comes across as most realistic and ultimately the most likable because of this grit.The successful outcome of the plotting is ultimately unbelievable, realistically motivated or not: with the amounts of money at stake here, with business associates and tax obligations and lawyers and criminal investigators involved (because of the violent crimes), the women's rather crude scheming would ultimately fail. That basically depletes the last bit of cleverness their scheming lends the story, and it comes across as lame..END SPOILER ALERTIssues that should have been addressed with some editing, or even second thoughts: the POV shifts often and the same vocabulary is used throughout to describe characters' thoughts.  Example: an upper middle class woman uses the same terminology for breasts (titties) as the male characters. Speaking of offensive, there is some use of the n-word by black characters in this book. The author and some readers may find it appropriate to the dialogue, but it deserves mention as a warning.At one point, the timeline is announced as "Two Years Earlier" but subsequent chapters switch freely between the two timelines without notifying the reader.  The reader has to follow that by noticing which characters are in the scene.Dialogue attributions are stretched to the point of distracting from the dialogue: smirks are overused and so are laughs, which are used to indicate that the characters said something funny even though there really wasn't enough humor there to justify a laugh. And even more distracting was the fact that attributions are routinely separated from the dialogue by periods when commas should have been used. It doesn't just look strange, but it's illogical.Misused words were common: `pass' for past (consistently), `rose peddles' for rose petals, `in tack' for intact, `puddy' for putty, `every since' for ever since, `I' am' for I'm (consistently), `it'd took him' for it'd taken him, `nozzle' for gun muzzle, `laid' for lay. There were more, and each one dumped me out of the narrative.I received a free download of this book in exchange for an honest, non-reciprocal review.