Rating: WARTY!
The test of whether a novel is a worthy read is what you recall of it afterwards. You don't need to recall it all in perfect detail, by any means, to know you liked it, but if you recall the overall plot and some fondly remembered details, it did its job. That's the problem I had with Drones - a few days after I read it and came to write this review, I discovered I couldn't remember a thing about it and I realized that I would have to leaf through it to refresh my memory. I do remember I didn't finish it because the story was nonsensical to me and uninteresting. Of course your mileage may differ. I hope it does, but this is my take on it.
This was supposed to be a satire on terrorism, but it fell flat for me. It was really hard to follow what was really going on, and since it mixed 'real life' (the main characters are drone pilots) with 'fiction' (they take a few days off in Vegas and stay at a "terrorism themed hotel"), it was also hard to grasp at first whether there was real terrorism was going on in Vegas, or whether it was just "play".
I know it was satirical, but after starting into this, I really began to find the theme abhorrent, and the action totally confusing. Half the time I had no idea what was going on or how we got to this page from the previous page, and it quickly became tedious to read, and not at all engaging to my mind. I quit reading at around the 75% mark because I had better things to do with my life than to sit through any more of this trying to figure out what was going on. I can't recommend it. If the art work had been brilliant, that might have made some difference, but it was merely workman-like, and while it wasn't bad, it had nothing special to recommend it.
