Review: A quirky adventure that makes you think...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 3, 2012
Neville Landsdowne "fell off," or more accurately let go, of the crazy spinning world. First he has to orient himself to no longer being in his fast paced environment. Then, as he meets others who met a similar fate and how they've adapted, he comes to learn this newfound existence won'tlast forever. Unexpectedly, he finds himself at the forefront of the effort to try to bring everyone together to figure out what to do before time runs out. The characters he meets all are very quirky, with all of them well developed for their metaphorical roles in this tale. For a tale about slower moving life after falling off the world, the story is surprisingly fast-paced in a very good way.DOODLING, simply put, is a metaphor about life. To fully explain the metaphor would spoil the ending, but essentially it's about how to cope when life goes absolutely out of control. Neville in his situation amongst the asteroids is like taking a breather from life. Dealing with the dangercompares to letting the world run a person's life again instead of a person choosing the course of their destiny. A fantastical journey is a great way to impart such thinking on a profound subject.The only thing I found myself wanting more of is that I don't get a sense of Neville before he fell off the world. This is not to say you would need to show him on the world and then falling off it - it is always better to pull the reader right into the action - but I have no sense of him in terms of his age. I don't know if he a college age man, a middle aged man, or an older one. All the people he meets are more interesting than Neville himself, which is interesting so that he doesn't distract from their quirkiness. This might have been intended for readers to bring any vision of Neville they wanted to the table as an everyman, but for me I wanted something more concrete about him to grab onto like one of those asteroids to understand the hero I rooted for and to know how much he fully comprehended the before and after impact of falling off the world.(review originally appeared at SciYourFi blog)