Hey Guys! Sorry for the lack of posts! I'm vacation now, so I have a bunch of plans. I promise I'll spam you for the last four days of June and for July too! I can't guarantee though.
Series: The Mortality Doctrine (#1)
Genres: Young Adult, SciFi, Fantasy, Adventure
Published: October 8, 2013
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Purchase: Amazon |
Barnes & Noble
Michael is a gamer. And
like most gamers, he almost spends more time on the VirtNet than in the
actual world. The VirtNet offers total mind and body immersion, and it’s
addictive. Thanks to technology, anyone with enough money can
experience fantasy worlds, risk their life without the chance of death,
or just hang around with Virt-friends. And the more hacking skills you
have, the more fun. Why bother following the rules when most of them are
dumb, anyway?
But some rules were made for a reason. Some
technology is too dangerous to fool with. And recent reports claim that
one gamer is going beyond what any gamer has done before: he’s holding
players hostage inside the VirtNet. The effects are horrific—the
hostages have all been declared brain-dead. Yet the gamer’s motives are a
mystery.
The government knows that to catch a hacker, you need a hacker.
And they’ve been watching Michael. They want him on their team.
But
the risk is enormous. If he accepts their challenge, Michael will need
to go off the VirtNet grid. There are back alleys and corners in the
system human eyes have never seen and predators he can’t even fathom—and
there’s the possibility that the line between game and reality will be
blurred forever.
This book by James Dashner truly caught me by surprise. His best selling series, The Maze Runner, was very similar, whereas both books focus on mystery and action. They're both SciFi and Dystopian novels, with high tech advancements in the future. The only thing that was vastly different was the storyline. The Eye of Minds focused on computer hacking and games that start within your game coffin. The Maze Runner focused mainly on escaping the maze.
That storyline aspect of a novel is very unique and important to me. I read for entertainment and I review to recommend. Therefore, if the storyline/plot is boring, then I will be bored, which will cause me to review this with below 3 stars. :D But I loved the world building and how Dashner makes the characters seems so realistic. I don't find much of the main protagonists very mysterious but that's what makes the characters seem so realistic, because they each have their own personalities and they don't really annoy me. The best part of this novel was the world building, so let me get into that element.
For obvious reasons, this reminded me of the anime; SAO (Sword Art Online) and that's what intrigued me to read EoM. The world building of the VirtNet was very interesting and differs a lot from the SAO world. And the amount of thinking that goes into writing must be insane. You just want to live in that beauty of a world. I mean, think of staying at home all the time. It must be boring, but when you get to experience a different world in your mind? It's just insanity.
I wasn't worried at all about the similarities between SAO and EoM. I was excited to read it. When SAO had ended, I was very sad. I wasn't devastated, because I'm pretty used to book series/anime series ending off, but I was just excited to read a novel that sounded a lot like SAO. That's the thing though. My first sentence of this review: . . .caught me by surprise because it was a completely different plot. The VirtNet and the three protagonists was that aspects that changed my worries about the similarities.
