2 out of 4 stars
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What would you do if you woke up to find yourself stranded on a deserted island with only your best friend by your side? The heroes of Island Games: Mystery of The Four Quadrants, by Caleb J. Boyer, must answer such a question quickly or pay with their lives.
With no memory of how or why they are on this mysterious island, these two young friends must band together to survive a myriad of dangerous challenges and find a way home. This isn’t a typical story about stranded characters and we learn nothing is as it seems. We just have to hope the heroes survive long enough to find out what’s going on.
This book is a fun, easy read for anyone who enjoys adventure stories, and is exciting enough to be considered a page-turner. The author does a great job describing the many action sequences and leading us through the chapters. I found myself eager to return to the adventure to find out what would happen next.
Although I mostly enjoyed the story, I felt the author forced personal development upon his characters often, even when it didn’t work. It just wasn’t realistic for a character to slowly download a superfluous moral, while watching a herd of vicious beasts run towards him with carnage on their mind. I felt these multiple attempts at life lessons were cumbersome and clogged up the story; the island was a pressure cooker and development would’ve occurred naturally, had the author trusted his characters and the story enough to let it happen on its own.
Also, although the characters had been best friends from an early age, an awkwardness pervaded the relationship. I felt this had something to do with an unrealized crush Matthew had on Ryan, but I could be taking undue liberties with my interpretation. It just felt so obvious that I kept waiting for it to be addressed or explained away, but it was just left to sit there and quietly cast its shadow on their interactions. An unrelated observation is that their banter whipped around wildly from catty to corny to apologetic and they overreacted to minor things, which seemed odd until the author had the genius idea to hint that darker forces may be at work. From that point on, when the characters did something weird, like not realize they’d peed in their pants while laughing at some minor thing, we think it’s because a cruel being is making them do it.
In fact, there are a lot of hints that led to a variety of theories and explain away a lot of the issues I had with the writing. The author dropped a lot of clues along the way, which kept my brain busy trying to guess the ending before it happened. Unfortunately, I felt the ending was an incredible disappointment. The author took liberties with our willful suspension of disbelief, but then failed to provide a plausible answer to the questions he spent so much time throwing around.
I enjoyed reading this story and can’t wait for the author’s future work, but I must give Island Games: The Mystery of The Four Quadrants a rating of 2 out of 4 stars. An ending matters and I was infuriated by what the author chose to do. In his Prologue, the author tries to explain himself, but this falls short as well. As talented as the author is, the truth is that he was twelve when he wrote this story, a fact that inconveniently shines through after the quality of the story leads one to hold it to a higher standard than his age would typically merit.
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Island Games
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