Review: Completely unrealistic
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 10 4, 2011
Note:  when I downloaded this, it was only a short story.  When I went back to the page to review it, I saw that it had been expanded to include a "trilogy," but I didn't really enjoy it enough to download and read the rest of it.The idea of a post-apocalyptic future where a group of young people come together to hack into pre-collapse information may have potential, but the story was hamstrung by the author's unyielding desire to hammer his audience with a ideological point of view.  Can an ideological novel be successful?  Definitely.  Can an ideological novel be successful if the author sacrifices components of basic storytelling to serve his ideology?  Unlikely.Char, the main character, is an eleven-year-old who never acts like an eleven-year-old.  She's always the smartest person in the room - and not just the smartest, but also the best at fighting.  A grown man trained in fighting tells her that he's confident that she could beat him - why, I'm just not sure.  Because she fought other kids?  When she finally gets to the hacking school, they - knowing very little about her - let her know that they're basically building the entire school around her.  She says she doesn't trust anybody, but she's willing to lap up all the pseudo-profound insights the main school admin gives her about information and the nature of freedom.  When she wants to talk about something, they suspend school for three days to give her a chance to lecture everybody and then they tell she's graduated.  I really don't understand why the author didn't make her character older - maybe it becomes clear in later stories.It's a farrago of sophomoric "insights" about the free flow of information and wish fulfillment.  Whenever you run into a character who is the best at everything ever, you have to wonder - who does this character represent for the author?  She's certainly not like any real person you could ever run across.  Every couple of pages you're getting a stream of clunky exposition and political theory mixed with blandly unrealistic characters.