Review: Needs more polishing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2014
The story has some interesting ideas.Unfortunately, there was a lot of telling instead of showing in the beginning, on top of which we're introduced to a lot of characters. I've never been good with names, and with the way this story is set up there are both real names and aliases, so right off the bat if five characters are introduced I'm supposed to remember ten names. With the telling instead of showing on top of that, I didn't have a lot to remember the characters by. We get told "X doesn't like Y" or "Z is a genius".When they text each other a lot of times the book is pretty good about mentioning which alias is who, but not always.The characters are trying to find their missing parents. It's a good setup, but Harry is the only one we get much background about. And it was good. Harry had a genius father that people admired, but his father mostly ignored him so he never felt very attached. Instead, he felt more attached to his mother, who actually paid attention to him. I wish we'd seen more with his mother.I know almost nothing about the other parents people are looking for. It's like a missed opportunity to get to know each character and their stories.There are a lot of times when characters look for a McGuffin in a story and it's fine (for example, pirate stories almost always involve finding treasure, but the treasure is rarely that important to the story). The parents shouldn't be McGuffins. They should be people the reader is hoping get saved.There's a lot of talk about 'decrypting files', 'having secret meetings', 'secret missions' or 'playing the Truth Seeker game'. All of these things stay vague a lot of the time and take up more of the book than needed, because they discuss them but we don't see much. I couldn't even say exactly what type of game 'Truth Seeker' is.I didn't feel the connection between the characters. Some were there, like Cristal and Kerim. I believed they were decent friends after the time we saw them together. The book pushed for me to believe that they were a lot more than that, though, and I just never felt it.The same was true for many other characters. I think the book suffered for having so many characters in it. Not only that, but much of the time we're seeing things from Cristal's point of view, and she doesn't understand other languages, which the characters kept talking in.This left me at points trying to remember who some characters were because we only see them briefly and they didn't do much.At times I didn't understand the motivations or reactions of the characters, either. I didn't see a reason for Harry to keep information to himself the way he did, and it wasn't surprising when that backfired. Kerim and Gabriel first meeting each other was confusing because they were fighting, for some reason, and then weren't, for some reason.At the end there was a lot of exposition by two of the characters, so it was a lot more telling.One of the things that took me out of the story was how Cristal couldn't learn Spanish. Not because she had trouble with the language, but because she and her teacher decided it was hopeless for her to ever learn Spanish after she took classes for two months and had three lessons with the teacher.People who are fully immersed in a language usually give yes-no like responses and are generally silent for the first three months, and people who have less exposure will take even longer to learn. Even if Cristal had unrealistic expectations for herself, her teacher should have known better.When the author showed us stuff, on the other hand, it worked so much better. Also at the end of the story, Cristal is trying to deal with beams of light energy coming from her, and yelling that if Harry really wanted to help her he'd help her deal with all the light beams. It was a good visual, and it was funny and showed her personality.Like I said before, with the scenes she had with Kerim I believed they got along. They had some decent scenes together for me to believe that Cristal would trust him more than Harry. I never felt like it built up to as much as the book was pushing, though.I think the story is original and the ideas for it were good, but it didn't carry through in the execution. These same ideas could work great if the story was polished up. I tried to get into the book but had a really hard time connecting with the characters.