Author: Eoin Colfer
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!
Today is December 19th, and in this crazy month of alphabetization, it's time to review a novel titled starting with 'S'!
This is a novel that's far more griping than gripping. It's a dystopian future where a city called Satellite harbors so much pollution that everyone would actually be dead were it real. The descriptions are so asinine that they're caricatures worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon rather than a serious attempt at decent young-adult fiction. Not one of the main characters is remotely interesting, and I couldn't stand to listen to the audio book after a few tracks. I kept skipping the boring bits to find interesting bits only to find that I was skipping everything because it was all uniformly boring.
Everything is extreme - there is no middle ground which made it completely unbelievable. I had resisted reading Colfer's (first name I thought was pronounced like mine, but it's actually pronounced 'Owen') 'Artemis Fowl' series because it just looked stupid and boring, and now I know what a wise decision that was - especially after starting on one recently and finding it boring so I;m done now with Colfer's books. I picked this one up only because it was on close-out, and that's coincidentally the best thing for it.
The disaffected narrator is known as Cosmo. He lives in the absolute worst orphanage (Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys) that it's possible to imagine. There is no way something like this would exist. We're told this is in the near future - "soon", but there is no conceivable way in hell that society could backslide to this extreme degree in so short a time-frame.
Indeed, this entire novel was so farcical that it very effectively undermined everything that came afterwards. We're expected to believe that this is a highly advanced technological society, yet there's still pollution to a degree that makes Chernobyl look like a fruit-juice stain and no one seems to have any idea how to fix it!
By a ridiculous fluke, Cosmo escapes the orphanage and lucks into joining a band of "supernaturalists" who are hunting down strange translucent blue "creatures" which appear after accidents and suck the life out of the victims (so we're expected to believe, but this is a lie). The creatures used to appear only for badly-injured people but now are propagating and appearing on even mildly injured people. Given what the creatures are really doing, why they aren't appearing on literally everyone in a polluted society like this is an unexplained mystery.
I was turned off this from the very start by the absurd description of the orphanage, but although I thought I was starting to get into it after a little bit, I really wasn't, and I got to the point where I could stand to listen to any more of this ridiculous farce.
