Review: Fun Read!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 25, 2014
The Goods – The characters in this book are deeper than some of the ones in past books. I can see that Jake is spending a lot more time with his characters and thinking through them. He’s created deep characters in the past, but in this book there’s more of them. Fewer two-dimensional characters is a good thing, most definitely. The plot is also very enjoyable. There’s a lot that the main characters don’t know and just when they think they’ve figured something out the world gets a little more screwed up. They have help along the way, but even this help isn’t always reliable or available. The whole thing moves along briskly and when I saw that it was almost three hundred pages I was a bit surprised.The Bads – I first few chapters of this book were awesome. Then it hit a few dead spots for me as they trundled through the Sicklands. Things got… weird. Even by Jake Bible’s standards. This may not be a problem for anyone else but me, but when the tone of the book changed, about the time they met the GenWrecks, it stumbled. It didn’t fall, but it took a few chapters for me to get back into the swing of things. When the group got to its destination the whole book picked right back up again. There are also a few typos that the copy editor missed. I’m seeing more and more of these pop up and not just in the Indie books I read. There’s not a lot of bad to be found here. I had to look.Overall – This was a fun read. I like the “land mines” he laid for book two. He says this looks to be a two to three book series. If he takes his time I could see it going four. The concepts, especially the bug hounds and how he handles AIs, are a lot of fun, and I’d be interested to see more of what life in the Clean Cities is like for the general population. Hopefully we’ll get a little more of that.I give this book four out of five Cooties.