Rating: WARTY!
This is book one in a series titled 'The Themis Files'. I am not a fan of series unless they're exceptional, and few are. I am certainly not interested in pursuing this one, because I couldn't even get started on this novel. It's written in an interview format which is lazy at best, and downright irritating at worst. The book has officious chapter titles of the form that self-importantly give time and place, and this format irritates the heck out of me. If the story felt important, I would have more tolerance for this farce, but this one did not. It felt childish and amateur.
Despite the author's rather exotic sounding name, this novel is set squarely in the USA, because, as you know, nothing can possibly be found anywhere else in the world that might be of the slightest interest. That, in and of itself, isn't a huge indictment, but it does show a certain lack of daring and imagination which are not qualities which recommend a novel boasting inexplicable artifacts at its core.
All of that aside, the story wasn't interesting, which sounds like a really odd thing to say when it centers around the discovery of a 22 foot metal hand and some panels that appear to have an unknown and untranslatable language, all made of exotic metals, and all of which glow with a light from a seemingly non-existent power source. The twist is that these artifacts are evidently several thousand years old - and so, of course, should not have existed. How can you take an interesting premise like that and render it boring? Well, by writing in the laziest way possible - creating an interview-style story, where there is absolutely no descriptive prose whatsoever other than the aforementioned chapter 'titles'. The interviews, larded with unimportant details, were unrealistic and weren't even remotely interesting. The story therefore had no personality whatsoever. It felt cold and clinical, and it read like a transcript from some totally tedious Congressional Committee on the Proliferation of Mind Numbing. None of the characters had any life or personality to them.
The book began with a prologue which I skipped, because I flatly refuse to read prologues. If it's important enough to include, then put it in chapter one or later. In this case the prologue quite evidently related the pointless story of main character Rose Franklin literally falling on the hand whether she talked the the hand is unstated.... This same story is related with commendable brevity in the interviews, rendering the entire prologue redundant. Rose becomes a physicist who then gets to investigate the artifacts, although why a physicist (as opposed to, say, archaeologists, anthropologists, metallurgists, linguists, and so on) would be doing this was unexplained in the portion I read.
I requested this as an advance review copy because it sounded really interesting, but I managed only about twenty pages into this before total nausea overcame me. I honestly could not bring myself to read more and had to give up before my brain shut down completely. Maybe it changes format and becomes brilliant on page twenty one, but skimming forwards page after page showed no end in sight, and so extreme skepticism forbade further investigation. Some reviews I read indicated that it gets worse in the second half, so I was glad I didn't waste my time reading on when there are so many other richly-written and personality-filled novels out there waiting to be discovered. I can't recommend this based on what little I read.
