Three Days in April is Edward Ashton’s debut novel. It is his first foray into a world resembling the Stupid War novels. There are free artificial intelligences that want to be as silico-Americans. There are humans with nanotech implants, exoskeletons, and genetic modifications. National Security forces attack epidemic outbreaks with weaponized drones called crowbars. In one case, most of the population of Hagerstown is wiped out to prevent a pandemic. The plot follows a group of young adults with technological and genetic modifications that make them targets of corporate and government intrigue.
Three Days in April does not have the polished style of Ashton’s recent work, but it demonstrates his promise as a world-builder. ( )

Interesting concept, poorly executed, the techno-nerd characters are particularly stupid. If you can get past them then the concept is clever. ( )

AI story of conflict. NET security is dominant force of good and evil. Genetic mods and nano are evolving forces of chaos. Anders and Terry do their best to survive in a world where total destruct could happen at any moment. ( )

This book had some interesting concepts but overall it fell flat for me. One of the major problems that I had with the book was the writing style. While the prose was easy to follow and the voice was overall fairly sardonic, unfortunately the author was trying to write in multiple voices, and they all read the same way. In fact, it took my about half of the second chapter before I realized we had completely switched to a new character, that's how similar the voices were. It would be okay if it was a third person narrator, but each character narrates their chapters in the first person and because of this failure to give each character their own distinct voice, no character really stood out to me and I never really cared about the characters.

There were some interesting concepts in this book, especially the body modifications and the sentient AIs. But overall, the plot never quite came together for me. Even though characters jumped from place to place a lot, there never seemed to be much urgency to their actions, and I never felt particularly scared or moved by their predicaments. The ending was very abrupt and slightly unresolved. Overall, this book had some good concepts, but they never quite came together to be a really compelling story and the narrative style hindered the story because all of the characters blended together. ( )