2 out of 4 stars
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On an average camping trip, eight year old Adam Michael Galileo becomes lost in the woods. Unable to find his family, the exhaustion of his searching and the fear of being lost forever lead him to fall asleep. He's awakened by a deep voice stating that he has been given a gift by Grich Kalter, and discovers in his hand a glowing stone. Suddenly his worries are gone, and later on he's the only one of his family to survive a horrible car wreck. Is the stone keeping him alive, and if so, why? And who is Grich Kalter?
Things get even more wild when he meets a woman named Maggie. After a bit of discussion, she tells him that the two of them are destined to be together and always have been, that they have a quest to save not only Earth but every bit of existence throughout the known and unknown galaxies.
My favorite thing about a good everyday hero sci-fi or fantasy novel is how they transform someone we can relate to into a mighty, amazing force to be reckoned with. Adam is in his early 20s, and while he's a Vietnam veteran (with a tour and a half under his belt in the Army), he's still no magical superhero. Between EVE, their spaceship, and Maggie training and teaching him, he ends up becoming a powerful man both in space and with hand-to-hand fighting.
Unfortunately, the book falls pretty flat with the action and the romance, the two main forces driving it. While the book does a good job setting a scene - from the interior of their spacecraft EVE to numerous different planets - it just doesn't do enough with them to keep the book interesting. The majority of Ralph Bucci's The Genesis Universe: The Magic Stone gives the less interesting events the majority of the pages and leaves the crazy battles and mystery solving only a handful. At one point a space battle is said to have gone on for 50 hours, for example, yet it was only 2 pages out of the 315 page book. This means that these moments, the ones that should be full of tense, powerful moments and questions of how they'll ever survive or defeat the forces of evil are reduced to really quick scenes that are over as quickly as they began, and I never once even had time to wonder if the main characters would be okay.
The other major flaw is that the romance and connection between Adam and Maggie is rather weak. It felt like Adam joked around quite often, which I love in an adventure, but he was constantly ridiculed for it and told he was ignorant by Maggie and EVE. As the story goes along this gets better, but it's rough to see happen so much for the first half of the book or so. Neither of their characters was particularly strong, either, and despite the fair length of the book it felt like there was no character growth whatsoever.
Finally, underlying these two issues is that the book really needed to be edited. There are numerous errors throughout, from using the wrong words to misspelling, incorrect punctuation, missing quotation marks and just about anything else. Despite there being so many, however, they disrupted my reading a lot less than grammatical errors typically do (aside from repeatedly calling a "frittata" a "fritada"). Also, it hurt me a little to read "OMG" used several times and even TMI within a book that takes place in the 1960s.
Aside from these issues, however, there's a fairly neat plot here that crosses religion with sci-fi, and the humor is incredibly cheesy but can be pretty funny at times for those who enjoy that kind of humor (like me!). The book does get into some light naughtiness, but anyone over 16 or so should be fine with it as the scenes are very mild.
As this is the first book in a series, my main basis of rating is whether I want to read the next book. At this time, unfortunately, I really don't unless there's an improvement on those two main issues. As such, I'm rating the book 2 out of 4 stars.
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The Genesis Universe
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