3 out of 4 stars
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The Understanding by Dennis Pennefather is a futuristic science fiction novel. The theme throughout this entire novel is the idea of humanism. The definition in this novel of humanism is similar to a typical view of humanism. The author explains it by saying,
The Understanding is centered on a brief period of time in the life of a fifteen-year-old boy named Adam. This boy is not a normal child, but rather a clone of his father. In this futuristic world that Adam lives in clones are gifted with a knowledge that is universally known as the Understanding. This gift of knowledge is supposed to come all at once to the clone when they are sixteen years old. Since Adam is incredibly close to being sixteen years old, he is anxiously awaiting the arrival of this gift.The most significant factor of Universal Humanism, is that there is no individualism, because we are all an integral part of the whole. Thus, there is no, them and us, only ‘Us’, expressed as ‘I’, replacing the old expression ‘God’.
After a tragic incident early in the novel Adam is swept into a mission with a boy named Noah. This mission will lead him straight to the girl he is destined to be with.
I enjoyed this novel. I liked the adventures in it and the inventiveness of the author in thinking of this futuristic world and its amenities. One of the hardest things about writing a book is figuring out how to convey information to the reader while not sounding like a book report. The author found a clever way to explain a large amount of information all at once with the use of long monologues from characters that have achieved an Understanding or a partial Understanding. This does lead to a few times where I would get a little bored that there was no conversation and someone just talking for several pages. Some of the information in these long monologues were also challenging because of discussing complicated topics that may or may not interest the reader.
This book had very few grammatical errors and no spelling errors that I could catch, but there are a lot of punctuation errors. The main error in punctuation was the overuse of commas. There were so many commas that were added in places that commas should not have been, such as
. But besides the extra commas the rest of the book was written very well.Adam’s, cheeks
I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. I liked the plot line to the book and I loved the themes throughout the book. But I will not give it four stars because the extra commas were just too annoying. Also, I would have liked to see more character development. I felt the characters were too flat for me to be invested in their future.
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The Understanding
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