Review of Time for PSyQ
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Review of Time for PSyQ
[Following is a volunteer review of "Time for PSyQ" by Marti Ward.]
The premise of Time for PSyQ focuses on young kids having psychic quantum abilities, which I found to be a very interesting theme, but if I had to sum up the overall story in one word, it would unfortunately be: Awkward. To give this novel a fair review though, I’ll start by listing the few good things I really liked:
Pros:
The science behind the kids’(and their pets) quantum gifts are fascinating and the book does a good job of continually expanding on the details and science behind the experiments(although not always well thought out as there’s at least one count of a psychic action simply working “somehow”).
The amount of scientific terminology and depth the author goes into gets surprisingly sophisticated considering this book is intended for a YA audience. I’m in my 30’s yet even I found myself looking up a few scientific terms.
Both of those points were done well enough to keep me interested in reading the book to the end despite the many other issues I’ll now move onto.
Cons:
Many times throughout the story, the dialogue is almost laughable — especially when a few things are explained as vaguely as “or something” or in oversimplified ways, which only seems to contradict how well the author explains some of the more scientific details behind the quantum topics, or how some of Airlis’ abilities are shown in much greater detail.
Similar to the dialogue, a vast majority of prose is written in such an awkward way I found myself rereading sentences(and even whole paragraphs) on more than one occasion just to make sure I had read them correctly. The author uses a wide variety of punctuation — and properly in most cases, which I would usually approve of otherwise — but he appears to have been far too eager to overuse punctuation at every possible chance, many times unnecessarily. On top of this, the word count is bloated with far too many filler words, along with “that”, “and” and “but” all being found numerous times on every page.
I won’t spoil anything, but the plot also tends to be rather contrived at times, having some characters, such as Inspector Humble of Minor Cases(a branch of the police focusing on “minors” as in underage kids, not just minor unimportant cases) and other authoritative roles almost act dumb to make Airlis appear smarter.
When it comes to mistakes and typos, I didn’t find too many actual writing errors, but like hinted at above, there are a lot of other minor annoyances that made this roughly 125 page book a much slower paced read than would normally be for me.
******
Time for PSyQ
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
The premise of Time for PSyQ focuses on young kids having psychic quantum abilities, which I found to be a very interesting theme, but if I had to sum up the overall story in one word, it would unfortunately be: Awkward. To give this novel a fair review though, I’ll start by listing the few good things I really liked:
Pros:
The science behind the kids’(and their pets) quantum gifts are fascinating and the book does a good job of continually expanding on the details and science behind the experiments(although not always well thought out as there’s at least one count of a psychic action simply working “somehow”).
The amount of scientific terminology and depth the author goes into gets surprisingly sophisticated considering this book is intended for a YA audience. I’m in my 30’s yet even I found myself looking up a few scientific terms.
Both of those points were done well enough to keep me interested in reading the book to the end despite the many other issues I’ll now move onto.
Cons:
Many times throughout the story, the dialogue is almost laughable — especially when a few things are explained as vaguely as “or something” or in oversimplified ways, which only seems to contradict how well the author explains some of the more scientific details behind the quantum topics, or how some of Airlis’ abilities are shown in much greater detail.
Similar to the dialogue, a vast majority of prose is written in such an awkward way I found myself rereading sentences(and even whole paragraphs) on more than one occasion just to make sure I had read them correctly. The author uses a wide variety of punctuation — and properly in most cases, which I would usually approve of otherwise — but he appears to have been far too eager to overuse punctuation at every possible chance, many times unnecessarily. On top of this, the word count is bloated with far too many filler words, along with “that”, “and” and “but” all being found numerous times on every page.
I won’t spoil anything, but the plot also tends to be rather contrived at times, having some characters, such as Inspector Humble of Minor Cases(a branch of the police focusing on “minors” as in underage kids, not just minor unimportant cases) and other authoritative roles almost act dumb to make Airlis appear smarter.
When it comes to mistakes and typos, I didn’t find too many actual writing errors, but like hinted at above, there are a lot of other minor annoyances that made this roughly 125 page book a much slower paced read than would normally be for me.
******
Time for PSyQ
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
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Latest Review: Before The Storm by Charles Wendell Jones
