Thursday, October 2, 2014

The Galaxy Game

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord has all the makings of a good read for me: the potential for character development, sci-fi, interesting tech, and mysterious dealing.This is why I'm still confused as to how one book could travel so far off course.

I'll be honest, I almost gave up on this book a number of times. 

The Galaxy Game was very hard for me to follow, in fact, I haven't included a summary of the book because after reading it, I'm still not sure what the point of the novel was. It struck me as more a collection of half plots than a fully realized, coherent story.This greatly weakened the story for me as well as increased my confusion and sadness with the book.

Transitions between characters were hasty and often did not provide any context or warning for the shift. This required constant re-reading so that I could grasp whose point of view I was now supposed to be following.  

The characters themselves had great potential but never reached it. 
Rafi could have been a solid main character but none of the solid leads for character development were ever built upon. Though his family might have been a great source of emotional growth and development it was only introduced, ignored, and then "resolved" chapters later with a passing comment. In fact, none of Rafi's growth seemed to involve him or his actions.
The same goes for characters like Serendipity who sole purpose in the beginning seems to have been to bring forward a "familiar" pilot later in the plot. That kind of writing needs to be executed flawlessly not to feel lazy, unfortunately I can't say that happened here.

Perhaps I was just tired, perhaps I'm the wrong audience and maybe someone else will love this book, however The Galaxy Game is not a book I will be picking up again.

1.5/5 stars

I received this book through NetGallery in exchange for my honest opinion.

No comments:

Post a Comment