Beware of the blurb

Over Christmas I read a book I'd been saving as a treat for when I'd finished the edits on my own novel.  It was an SF story, and the blurb promised a narrative involving genetically-engineered animals and an environmental issue.  On the face of, this was just the sort of book I should like.

But the reality was very different.  What the narrative really was was a strung-out, sprawling family saga.  The first viewpoint, which lasts around a third of the book's length, has some connection to the genetically modified animals.  However, the viewpoint character is a mere observer of them, and the special relationship between those enhanced animals and the humans who work with them isn't described in detail.

We never get to experience that special connection through the mind of a viewpoint character.  The author makes some vague mention well into the book that the human can affect the animal's thoughts, but the reader is never shown any detail of how that link works, or what it feels like.  To me, this was a massive cop-out.  It was the unique selling point of the novel, and it wasn't developed.  That viewpoint fizzles out with the character thinking about a place she's never visited.

I read on to the end of the book partly to discover if there was a reason for this character with no agency being in the book.  Did she affect the events of the book somehow, given that she'd been allotted so much airtime?  The answer was no, and I didn't think she justified her existence.  And to add further annoyance, she had a casual attitude to sex which irritated me too.

The secret at the heart of the book is that the modified animals were a government experiment.  And  the people who can talk to the animals are being kidnapped.  It turns out they're wanted to decode an alien message that the government's been receiving for years and keeping secret.

I've rarely felt so let down by a book.  It was an incoherent mess, with the first viewpoint serving no purpose which furthered the story.  She didn't achieve anything, and she didn't need to be there.

The premise of the blurb, which drew me to the book, wasn't fulfilled.  I'd expected a exploration of the relationship between the modified animals and humans, and I didn't get it, so I probably won't read any more of that author's work.  A blurb is not enough to make me fall in love with an author, especially when that blurb is misleading.