Time Shifters: Episode One of the Chronicles of the Harekaiian

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.
(This review will contain spoilers).

Time Shifters is a fairly short story. It does a pretty good job of pulling the reader into its world, where, for Akalya, shifting around through time and space is completely normal.

She and others like her blend into the background as they go through life, but someone is starting to kidnap them, and she decides she should do something to save them.

Akalya is a pretty strong character. I like that she’s a fairly old character, and I also like that she definitely had strong opinions about what she liked. I didn’t feel like she was a blank slate.

She’s pretty realistic in her motivations. On one hand, she doesn’t really know the other Harekaiian all that well. But she feels compelled to save them – not because she has some superb sense of justice, but there’s a layer of problems facing her. One of the captives is someone she’s familiar with and wants to help. She’s also worried about the fact that her people are being kidnapped, and she could be next. There’s also a smaller sense of not wanting to turn her back on them. All of her feelings about it are very understandable.

The way she uses her powers to solve problems is interesting. She has a great advantage over others, but she’s not invincible, and she doesn’t know what tricks the enemy is using.

It was a fun read. It did drag at parts where things got over-described. For example, using her powers makes her hungry and she often stops to eat in the book, but I didn’t need to know exactly what she was eating every time. Sometimes she made mental commentary – like comparing shakes in the late 60’s to modern shakes. Other times it was just a list of food.
I think the other weak spot was when she was with Marcus. We get told more about the time they spent together and don’t get shown too much of it, so the connection we’re supposed to believe they formed during their talk wasn’t as strong as it could have been. I also got a little lost in how he got to where he was. She teleported him back in time, and had him bring her food in another place, but after he brought her food what happened to him?
In the spot where it’s initially described, he kisses her, brings her food, and then is sort of forgotten in the narrative. It doesn’t say he leaves or vanishes or anything. It’s like the book just forgot he was there, and the Akalya travels through time on her own. So wouldn’t he have still been left in that time? I got a bit lost at that part.

It was a nice start for a series though, with a strong lead and an interesting plot.

I give it about an 8/10.

Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare (The Guardians)

I picked up this book because I heard about it after the “Rise of the Guardians” movie came out.

First, I’d like to mention how nice the presentation for this book is. It looks beautiful, and it has nice inside art, too. It’s one of the better looking books I’ve seen.

The way it’s written makes me think of a person sitting in a chair, telling a story to a bunch of people around them. It took me a little while to get into it. It definitely has its own, unique style.

It’s very whimsical and there’s a lot of humor in the writing (for example, North, the character, making a compass that points to himself).

It was enjoyable. The characters were likable, and it had a certain feel to its world. It was “Earth” and yet full of magic and everything seemed to have intelligent – whether a beam of light from the moon or an insect.

It had a fairytale like charm, where it could spout out anything as existing in this world and the explanation is “because”. It didn’t worry about trying to explain the science behind things. For instance, a little girl is tossed high enough to reach the clouds, and lands safely because she’s caught. Obviously she’s still be a pancake, but this is the sort of story where cows can jump over moons or trees can come to life and it’s not questioned.

I did enjoy it and plan on getting the next book sometime.

I also appreciate that while, obviously, this wasn’t the end of the series, the book did have its own end. This particular adventure finished instead of stopping a story somewhere in the middle and asking people to buy the next book.

I give it about an 8/10.

The Enchanted Castle (Shioni of Sheba)

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.
(This review will contain spoilers).

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading this book. I’m not familiar with Ethiopia or the myths and lore from there.

I loved this story. It hit the ground running and kept going. There was never a chapter where I was wondering, “When will something happen?”

The characters are likable. I liked Shioni, Anni, Nomuula and General Getu. The characters all had their personalities and the side characters felt like people, too.

The plot was interesting and there was a lot of action. There were some parts where characters gave exposition, but by the time they did I cared enough about them to want to listen to them.

That’s not to say everything was perfect.
The narrative does some things I wouldn’t normally recommend, such as throwing around exclamation point, but it worked here. It might have been overused a bit, but I never felt annoyed by it.
The part where Zi wakes up felt a little abrupt as well.

But besides that I don’t have much criticism to give. Even the animals were charming. I loved this image of a horse imagining herself after running away from the enemy:
“Star was not too tired to send her a boasting picture of a pony with wings swooping over the peaks and valleys.”

I think it was a great adventure and fans of fantasy would love it. I give it a 10/10.

Doubt (Among Us Trilogy)

The story has some interesting ideas.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of telling instead of showing in the beginning, on top of which we’re introduced to a lot of characters. I’ve never been good with names, and with the way this story is set up there are both real names and aliases, so right off the bat if five characters are introduced I’m supposed to remember ten names. With the telling instead of showing on top of that, I didn’t have a lot to remember the characters by. We get told “X doesn’t like Y” or “Z is a genius”.
When they text each other a lot of times the book is pretty good about mentioning which alias is who, but not always.

The characters are trying to find their missing parents. It’s a good setup, but Harry is the only one we get much background about. And it was good. Harry had a genius father that people admired, but his father mostly ignored him so he never felt very attached. Instead, he felt more attached to his mother, who actually paid attention to him. I wish we’d seen more with his mother.

I know almost nothing about the other parents people are looking for. It’s like a missed opportunity to get to know each character and their stories.
There are a lot of times when characters look for a McGuffin in a story and it’s fine (for example, pirate stories almost always involve finding treasure, but the treasure is rarely that important to the story). The parents shouldn’t be McGuffins. They should be people the reader is hoping get saved.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘decrypting files’, ‘having secret meetings’, ‘secret missions’ or ‘playing the Truth Seeker game’. All of these things stay vague a lot of the time and take up more of the book than needed, because they discuss them but we don’t see much. I couldn’t even say exactly what type of game ‘Truth Seeker’ is.

I didn’t feel the connection between the characters. Some were there, like Cristal and Kerim. I believed they were decent friends after the time we saw them together. The book pushed for me to believe that they were a lot more than that, though, and I just never felt it.
The same was true for many other characters. I think the book suffered for having so many characters in it. Not only that, but much of the time we’re seeing things from Cristal’s point of view, and she doesn’t understand other languages, which the characters kept talking in.
This left me at points trying to remember who some characters were because we only see them briefly and they didn’t do much.

At times I didn’t understand the motivations or reactions of the characters, either. I didn’t see a reason for Harry to keep information to himself the way he did, and it wasn’t surprising when that backfired. Kerim and Gabriel first meeting each other was confusing because they were fighting, for some reason, and then weren’t, for some reason.
At the end there was a lot of exposition by two of the characters, so it was a lot more telling.

One of the things that took me out of the story was how Cristal couldn’t learn Spanish. Not because she had trouble with the language, but because she and her teacher decided it was hopeless for her to ever learn Spanish after she took classes for two months and had three lessons with the teacher.
People who are fully immersed in a language usually give yes-no like responses and are generally silent for the first three months, and people who have less exposure will take even longer to learn. Even if Cristal had unrealistic expectations for herself, her teacher should have known better.

When the author showed us stuff, on the other hand, it worked so much better. Also at the end of the story, Cristal is trying to deal with beams of light energy coming from her, and yelling that if Harry really wanted to help her he’d help her deal with all the light beams. It was a good visual, and it was funny and showed her personality.

Like I said before, with the scenes she had with Kerim I believed they got along. They had some decent scenes together for me to believe that Cristal would trust him more than Harry. I never felt like it built up to as much as the book was pushing, though.

I think the story is original and the ideas for it were good, but it didn’t carry through in the execution. These same ideas could work great if the story was polished up. I tried to get into the book but had a really hard time connecting with the characters.

I’d give it about a 5 out of 10.

Seeking The Storyteller

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.

The book could use editing for various things. I had a PDF file, so I can’t say if things were same in the Kindle version, but here’s a couple examples:

Page 7: “Alix was disgusted by the thought.
The figure…”

The indent for the first paragraph is shorter than the indent for the start of the next paragraph here.

Page 17: “He crouched in front of, Yvonne and slowly looking him over.”
Page 25: “He says that he was attacked first”
Page 34: “Other times, Fagan and Xaver would hang out at a bar, drinking tall mugs of beer that Alix would distasteful, preferring a classy, well-aged wine.”

I understand how easy it is to miss an error in hundreds of pages. An editor would help catch more of those as well as help clean up other things. For example,

“Fagan – Randall to his parents, but only because they believed in calling him by his dreadful first name – stepped out of the driver’s side and expertly closed his door without any sound.”

They’re just starting a hunt and the part about his name doesn’t belong. It would be better to find a way to work it in, if necessary, another time. Or, better yet, show it. Have his parents use his first name when talking to him.

There was also something odd that I haven’t seen before.
In places in the book a word will be crossed out. At first I thought this was perhaps the author making some sort of remark and then continuing on with the story, but then it also appeared in spots where that wouldn’t make sense.

Page 91: “He tried to keep his voice steady but (it) this new information was a bit disturbing.”

Since there are two authors, it makes me wonder if something like this happened while they were passing the document back and forth between each other and changing things, and somehow some of the corrections are still in the text with a strike-through.

And sometimes there’s things that don’t make sense. Cyn is given a button down shirt. She chooses to only button the top part so that her stomach is still exposed. Two pages later she’s asking if she can have a coat because she’s cold. If she’s cold I would imagine the first reasonable thing to do is button up the shirt.

As far as descriptions, I usually had a description to go with a character except for the group of Scough. When they were introduced, there was a paragraph of description for them, and I wasn’t sure which description went to which name for a lot of them.
There was a lot of repeatedly used words as well (everyone chuckles all the time).

There’s also the issue of Alix and gender. I didn’t care if he wanted to be considered male or female, but this is a tricky subject. For awhile it wasn’t clear if Alix wanted to be regarded as male or female or if he didn’t care what people called him, but by the end of the book it was clear – Alix repeatedly and consistently wanted to be considered male. He had a desire to go back to his previous life, but in his current state he wanted to be considered a man.
It’s one thing for demons on another world to be uninformed and confused about it, but for the people around Alix it was disrespectful when they would change pronouns on him or decide at will to go against the gender he preferred to go by. Tackling a subject like this, it’s necessary to understand what would be considered okay and what wouldn’t be, otherwise characters can come off like jerks when they aren’t meant to be. Luckily I don’t recall too many situations where Alix was addressed in person as the wrong gender, although people did bring it up his original name several times.

There was one other issue that came to mind. I believe Cyn was supposed to be 15. I don’t know the ages of all the people who expressed and interest in her, but at least a few of them were old enough that they should be locked up for it. I’m not sure how old Mira was, but I was under the impression she was pretty young, too.

All of that aside, I can say I did enjoy the story and I think there were a lot of good, fleshed out characters. The copy I had, at least, had many errors that were still included in the text for some reason. I think with an editor to go over it, and to comb through and get rid of errors, telling-instead-of-showing, repetition and inconsistencies, this could be made into an exciting, fast-paced adventure. There’s a lot to work from and the world that was built up was fine and the characters were overall enjoyable. I’d love to see this book fixed up.

Right now, I think I’d give it about a 7 out of 10.

Hallowed: The Collection by Donald White

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.

The first thing I noticed about this book was the formatting. I had a mobi file, and there were no page breaks. The table of contents starts right under the copyrights (on the same page), and then the story starts right under the table of contents, instead of each having their own pages.

It opens with something to set the scene to connect the stories. That’s an interesting enough concept since most short story collections like this don’t bother to link them.
However, picturing a bunch of people in robes standing around a stone table and reading the tales can be pretty humorous at moments. Why?

Well, imagine a hooded figure standing in a circle with other cloaked figures, reading a scroll. Now, imagine that cloaked figure reading this from the scroll:
“That pool boy is sooo handsome.”

I keep picturing the cloaked figure adding some sass into that line.

The author also threw in lines with exclamation points, which made it read more like a comic book instead of a horror story.
“”So do I,” she smirked, patting him on the rear!”
“Even in the darkness of the room, he could make out the face of a woman in the reflection behind him!”
“There, in the darkness of his bedroom, was the face of a woman staring back at him!”

There were some good ideas here. For example, in the second story the idea of having children jumping rope to a rhyme, and the rhyme changing to be a little more sinister each time could work well in a scary story.
But the execution was lacking.

For example, I spent much of the second story confused because it goes right into mentioning the “realms” and “the mist” without explaining anything about them. I had no idea what the setting was supposed to be or why the main character seemed to find it all normal. The text bounced back and forth without making it coherent, so he would be entering “the mist” and then suddenly he would be somewhere where kids were jumping rope.

“Lady Killer”, I think, was one of my favorites both in the story and writing style. Both of the characters were interesting, and there could probably be a series written about Lisa. “The Hound” was also pretty good. “The Thing in the Shadows” was fine, too, although it had purple prose breaking up the story that I thought was unnecessary.

“Temple of the Life-Giver” felt like way too much was crammed into a short story.

The writing improved significantly from “Lady Killer” and on, but it still maintained the issues the previous stories did to a lesser extent. When I started reading the book, I thought I was going to end up giving it 4 stars after the first few stories. It started off with way too many italic thoughts, and the writing in the beginning didn’t build suspense for me (you can see some of the quotes from above). The latter parts of the book felt a lot different. The characters were built up better in most of them and the writing was more polished.
Still, because the writing did get better later on I bumped it up to to about 5 or 6/10 stars. It would be great if an editor looked over the work to fix it up.

Midnight Guests and Other Weird Stories

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a non-reciprocal review.

This was a collection of stories and I’ll discuss each briefly. I’ll try to avoid including spoilers in the summaries, but when I discuss them further it will include spoilers.

“Salazar’s Flamenco Dancer” was sort of like a discussion about a cursed painting. It felt a little like if a friend was telling you about something weird that happened.
“Hidden Canyon” was about a boy who has to kill a bear in order to be considered a man in his tribe. He comes across a strange beast that seems intent on killing him.
“Chimera” was about a woman suffering from sleep paralysis and seeing a strange snake man in her bedroom. It’s written as a letter from her to her doctor explaining what happened.
“Old Billy” is about the groundskeeper of a cemetery and a kid who lives nearby it and visits it often.
“The Wind in the Hollow” follows a young man who is attempting to sell his farm after it’s been considered cursed, and shows why people consider is cursed.
“El Curandero” is about someone visiting a shaman to get help.
“The Bells of San Xavier” is a poem. My eyes glaze over when I see poetry, so even though I read it I couldn’t even begin to describe what it’s about.
In “Skull Valley” the story is told through diary entries and is about an ancient book that has been found and people who are attempting to translate it.
In “Eyes of the Pine” a man is driving to meet his friends at a camping site when he gets strange texts warning him not to text and drive.
“Midnight Guests” is about a team of ghost hunters visiting a ranch to help explain a mysterious light that was appearing in the distance.
“The Ballad of Red Feather” was another poem.
“Biting Words” was a story about a woman attempting to find a hotel and get to her party. On the way, she keeps getting interrupted by homeless asking her for things like donations.
“We are Seven” is about a small schizophrenic girl and her hallucinations as she leaves the asylum and is taken in by her aunt.

The first four stories I felt were okay. Reading the first one was like hearing an anecdote about what happened because of a curse. There’s some follow-up on how the painting came to be cursed, but I felt like that was the weaker part of the story.
The second had a good set-up. The character was likable enough that I was interested in what would happen to him.
The third I was interested in what would happen to her, but the story never left me feeling threatened. Sleep paralysis can be a very frightening thing in and of itself so it’s a good enough set-up, but I think describing the creature see saw and it essentially standing there trying to look threatening took away from the story. I just didn’t think it was scary.
And for the fourth, it had some interesting parts but was confusing as well. At the end I still wasn’t sure why some of the stuff with the tree was happening, or how it could happen. I didn’t see a connection between spitting out gems and killing people, and even if I were to just say “supernatural tree” I’d still be wondering why it has a ton of gems. This probably could have been fixed if instead of gems coming up, something like jewelry was coming up. Then, when the boy sees the man killed and buried under the tree, there would be a connection to how jewelry ended up there.
“The Wind in the Hollow” was one of my favorite stories from this book. It’s the longest one, and gives the most time to build up the characters. One of the things a lot of horror films have a problem with is making people care that something is happening to the characters, but here I genuinely felt bad for the characters. There was some time to show who they were and what happened. When it got to the scary scene and the narrator was caught in the middle of it, it was scary and had me flipping the pages to see what would happen next. The story stays pretty strong throughout and ends in a way that makes sense, though a little too much time is spent on things like talking about directions in a cornfield. I think it only had two weaknesses that stuck out to me: one was the explanation, which I felt like it was thrown in there. There wasn’t much that hinted about what the explanation would be until a character tells the narrator. The second was I didn’t have a clue who the narrator was for much of the story. I do think this story is worth a read, though, and I liked it very much.
“El Curandero” left me confused. The story was mostly going into the man’s place and seeing weird things. While I’m sure some of it would be strange to see in person, it never felt that menacing. Nothing quite seemed like a conflict or climax or anything in it.
“Skull Valley” had a decent premise. I was let down by the big reveal because it left me wondering, “How long could they get away with this before a bunch of police were raiding the city?” If people were disappearing when they went into a small town, especially if there were witnesses to horrible things happening there who could report it, it probably wouldn’t last very long. At least at the end the narrator was thinking of calling the cops.
I think this story had a case of people not being believable. Even when the characters felt threatened and people were obviously doing things to get at them, they stuck around when they could have easily driven away.
“Eyes of the Pine” has a really good premise for the story. It’s modern and it was creepy. Again, the payout at the end felt a little forced like some of the others, but I feel like this story could really be good. It started out very ominous and you could instantly connect with how creepy it would be to be in the character’s position.
“Midnight Guests” was another one where I felt like the explanation was a bit weak. It’s very hard to write the payout for a scary story, because the moment the scares are explained it tends to take away the fear.
I did enjoy the two main characters for the story. I was invested in them and I was interested in hearing about the mystery. I think the build-up was good.
“Biting Words” had the same issue as “Skull Valley”. I could understand the character to an extent. She was a woman out at night in a dangerous area trying to find a party. Being approached by a strange, large man would be a scary thing for her. That’s perfectly understandable.
She reacted in a way that didn’t make sense to me, though. Instead of trying to politely get away from people she seemed more like she was going to provoke violence. When she’s the smaller person and most likely to lose a fight, it doesn’t make sense for her to needlessly aggravate people who she already believes are unstable. The only one that made sense to me was the elderly woman. The woman was in poor shape and non-threatening, so the main character wouldn’t have reason to believe anything bad would happen to her for yelling at the old woman.
I could believe her thinking bad things about the people, but it seemed overly short-sighted for her to readily voice her opinions about people when she thought they might hurt her.
I think the last story, “We are Seven”, had the best connection with the beginning and the end. There are clues beforehand that connect to the explanation given at the end. The character here, even though she’s mentally ill, is fairly understandable. It’s easy to see why she would like her friends and dislike other people. When she meets the priest we can see why she would try opening up to him at first and get increasingly annoyed when they talked about her as if she wasn’t there right in front of her.
I think the interesting part about this story is that she could very well be mentally ill for most of it to happen with nothing supernatural involved. I think only the part with the priest didn’t make much sense to me. If it had been changed a little, in a way were it could have happened even if her friends weren’t real, it would have been better. For most of the actions in the story I could see a way where she could have done something herself and then seen it as her friends doing it. For example, she could have easily overheard someone speaking about a stolen ring, and later on her friend tells her an explanation for how the ring got stolen. It could easily have been information she overheard or made up based on what the character herself knew.
The very end was a little strange but I think the overall story was a good one and the main character was interesting.

As a whole, the book had a few strong stories, a few weak stories, and several stories that were in the middle. One of the strong points for the author was making characters that the reader could get invested in. This isn’t done very well in a lot of horror.
The endings and explanations for a lot of the stories left something to be desired. Some came out of nowhere with no hints. I think the last story was the strongest when it came to this.
A lot of the stories had good ideas that I could see being molded into something really good with some work.

There were a few errors here and there but not enough to distract from the stories.

My favorites were “The Wind in the Hollow” and “We are Seven”. They happen to be the two longest. I think “The Wind in the Hollow” had the best scary scene in the entire book, as well as some good characters that readers could feel for. “We are Seven” has an interesting protagonist. Her character can be horrible yet understandable at the same time, and she could carry a story if done right.
For a lot of this book I would give around 6/10 stars. For those two stories though, I’d give around 8 or a little more.

The Lost Party (Red Dust)

I was given a free copy of this story in exchange for an honest, non-reciprocal review.

This is a short story, so it’ll also be a short review.

I enjoyed this story. It left me wondering what was going on until nearly the end. The main character is searching for about sixty people who have gone missing. He finds a diary, and the entries reveal how they went from a large, enthusiastic party to a small party, barely still moving on.
It’s not very long and kept things moving well enough to hold my attention.

It does need an editor. There were many places I saw that could have done with better word choices or that needed something like another comma. I wasn’t a fan of the use of present tense, either.

If someone is looking for a very quick read I would recommend it. I’d give it about a 7/10.

The Beethoven Incident

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest (non-reciprocal) review.
(Spoilers within)

“The Beethoven Incident” is a fairly fast-paced and light-hearted read. I didn’t get the feeling that it was meant to change someone’s life. It felt more like it was just meant to be a quick bit of fun.

There were parts I enjoyed, such as Mark calling Nicholas his dad and Valeria catching on quickly that it wasn’t true, and seeing how different periods in the past were changed.

There were also major issues, though.

Here’s an example of one of the paragraphs:
“Quite right.” He turned to his pilot, “Well, Ernest?” Ernie punched a few keys and looked at his control panel. “In a minute, Nick” he replied. “I just gotta scan the payload for mass and volume. We’ll be all set.” He punched a few keys and grinned at Mark.

This was very typical of the story. Multiple people would all have speaking parts jammed into the same paragraph. Many times I wasn’t sure which character was meant to be speaking. The “punched a few keys” is repeated twice. Periods instead of commas also bothers me.

Exclamation points were used too often. Random words would also get capitalized a lot.

Examples:
“I’ve got a Kid…”
“You are Americans, No?’ The Officer asked.

Besides the writing issues, there were also parts of the story that were a huge issue for me: the biggest part probably being Valorie. There’s nothing wrong with Valorie in and of herself, but it felt like she was put there to “be the girl” and her capabilities seemed unrealistic and forced.
Any time a woman appeared in the story everything seemed to revolve around how sexy she was, even if it made no sense for the characters to be attracted to her. For example, women that were from the 1800’s. The story does mention how much the place smells because the people barely bathe and and feces is left everywhere and such, but when a woman comes on scene the fact that she barely bathes isn’t taken into consideration. I think how dirty and smelly she is would play a large part in how much a man over a hundred years in the future would be attracted to her.

Valorie suffers this same fate. They meet her in the 1960’s and the first thing to be mentioned about her is how beautiful she is.

…he thought she was just about the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

She starts off in a very stereotypical female role – trying to heal people.
She also turns out the be smart, but as I mentioned before it felt like that was just forced onto her rather than being a natural role. The majority of the story happens within a span of about thirteen hours. In those hours she figures out how to make a program on a machine she’s never seen before to reverse the polarity of time. Not even Ernie, the man who lives in the future and does this for a living, knows how to run her program. I’d like her to be smart but that’s way too unrealistic. It also doesn’t hold, because just a few chapters later Ernie is working out a problem with the time machine that “not even Valorie” can do. Why not? Just because. So it establishes her as being a genius who can figure out things in an impossible amount of time but then it takes it back.

The way the men treat her also feels like they come from a few centuries back. They’re often patronizing and treat her like a child.

“What’s this “we” stuff, honey?” he (Ernie) replied.

I don’t think he would say that to another man. I would hope that in the future men would be a little more respectful of women.
That doesn’t stay consistent, either. One page later Ernie has gone from being condescending about letting her participate in their mission to this:

“Let her go, Nick.” Ernie suggested. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Maybe she’ll be of some use out there.”

I felt really disappointed with Valorie’s character because I ended up feeling like she existed only to be a love interest and her abilities were thrust on her to try and make her a strong character and not because it made any sense for her. Ernie even brings up that she’s a virgin, which bothered me. He didn’t bring up whether Mark was a virgin or not. It could have worked if he had also poked at Mark about being a virgin, but it just seemed like it was brought up so she could be ‘untainted’ for Mark.

Even at the end when she is running the time machine while Mark is outside and he gets attacked, she ends up hitting the attacker with a pipe. Then, of course, the attacker goes after her and she has to be saved. It made no sense at all because the reason she was running the machine was because only she understood how to use the program she made, and Nicholas and Ernie were both there. Why did she go out only to need rescuing? Why didn’t either of the other two help?
The main characters often felt interchangeable, but I was most disappointed with Valorie because she had so much potential and came out flat. Her romance with Mark was strange to me as well (remember, this story happened in a very short span of time), making it seem even more like she only existed to be his love interest.

To me this is the rough draft for a book that could be really good but it needs a lot of editing. I was mulling over what to rate this, but I’m going with 4/10 because I’ve certainly seen worse.