This just has to be said

I was trying to think of a way to fit this in, some witty segue to get this into context so I could complain about it smoothly...but screw it. I'm just gonna drop it in the middle.

These goddamn italics irritated the hell out of me.

Okay, yes, it's petty and pedantic of me, because I'm a little bit of a font geek, but when I'm reading a book, I like to get absorbed in it. And kudos for Hargrave's writing here, because it flows really well, and it's the kind of book that rushes you along so you can see what happens next. But every little scripty S I hit was like a visual speedbump. I felt like I had to mentally translate italics into English from 3rd-grade-penmanship-class English.

I can't imagine who made the font choice here, but they might as well have replaced each S with an F, give it big scripty 17th century fonts, and let me try to plow through that. I did get used to it after a while, as the text slowly rewrote my neural pathways to accept that the little S-thing was a letter just like all the others. Really, at that point, I probably would've accepted that was just a 27th letter I'd forgotten about.

As I was reading, I eventually noticed, hey, this isn't making me want to kick publisher ass anymore. I made a note of the page: 188, well past the halfway point. I know Hargrave didn't make this choice. He couldn't have. Someone who spends this much time writing doesn't want any reason to make his text difficult to scan.

huff huff wheeze. Okay. Done now.