Author: Michelle Gagnon
Publisher: Soho Press
Rating: WARTY!
Read pathetically by Rebecca Gibel
Normal nuclear matter has two quarks, but a strangelet has three. Strangelets are normally very unstable meaning, in this case, that they're not dangerous because they do not last long enough to become so, but it's been hypothesized that large strangelets could form, and consume significant amounts of matter by converting it to strange matter in a chain reaction.
None of that helps Gagnon's story, and this is a story which needed all the help it could get. Every sentence the reader reads irritated me because each sentence sounded glum or desperate and resigned. It's really annoying to listen to the monotonic and repetitive cadence.
The story is very much reminiscent of the 1997 movie Cube, but boring. The blurb on the back cover is completely misleading. It claims: "...three strangers should have died at the exact same moment..." but the truth is that they didn't die at the exact same moment - they didn't even look like they were going to.
The audio book version of the blurb gives the impression that there are only three of them, but in fact there are six, three boys and three girls, all in their teens. Sophie is the first one we meet, and she is dying of cancer in a hospice in California. Next we meet is Declan in Galway, Ireland, who is in danger of being shot by a thug he's crossed. Anat is in Israel trying to navigate a tunnel between the Gaza strip and Egypt to meet her Arab boyfriend.
All three of them wind-up in a building which has no windows, although it has curtains, and no exit, although it has doors. There they meet each other and three more teens, Zain, Yoshi, and Nico. Each of them is from a different nation and none of them have any idea how they got there. They all come form the same time period.
Despite the fact that these people aren't in a hospital, and it's patently obvious they're not, they keep on behaving as though it is! This was ridiculous. It was at this point that I realized that this story was going to drag majorly, because we went through track after track in which literally nothing happened.
It took forever for the two smallest: Yoshi (whose voice was annoying in the extreme as read by Rebecca Gibel) and Zain (whose voice was almost as annoying as Yoshi's), to get to the pit where they were volunteered to go through the clichéd air vent system and break out. So we have yet another prison in which the air-vents are the obvious escape route to everyone except the people who build and run the prison.
During this trip, Zain disappears, and no one ever goes looking for him. Indeed, for most of the story, no one seems to give a damn about what happened to him or to even wonder about it. They don't miss him. They find their way out of the prison "hospital" and are apparently in New York State, because nothing can happen if it isn't in the USA. The problem is that it takes them almost forever to realize that something is seriously wrong with the world. I am not kidding, these people are hands-down the dumbest clucks that ever clucked a cluck in the whole hen-house.
They're also the most fundamentally uninteresting characters in any story I've read in a long time. I had not the slightest interest in any of them except Zain, and that was only as far as wondering what happened to him. Perhaps his disappearance is explained. I skipped so many tracks I admit I may well have missed it, but I don't honestly feel like I missed anything.
The gist of the story is that they are in the future after disaster has struck, and their way back is to flick a switch. Yep. That's it. A dumb, stupid, pointless waste of time is what this so-called novel was. You know, "novel" also means new and original, but this wasn't either, nor was it interesting or inventive. I mean really, who gives a quark?
