1 out of 4 stars
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The Time Stone by Jeffrey Estrella starts off with the heist of a green emerald known as the Eye of the Gods. This small gem not only has a cool name, it's also the titular Time Stone, a stone potentially capable of taking a person (or people) through time and space at will! Immediately after taking the item, the thief vanishes, leaving no evidence of who he (or she) is.
Behind the theft are high ranking officials of Temporo, Inc. who have hired a group of "misfit ninja warriors" referred to as The Culto to steal it. To cover up the real perpetrator, they've come up with two scapegoats - a homeless wanderer named James Timewalker and a woman named Tina Prescott. The two of them went to high school together and barely manage to talk to one another during a chance meeting before they're thrown in prison for "their" crime.
However, you know a guy named James Timewalker isn't just some random homeless guy who will easily be written off. He discovers that he has telekinesis - he can move things with his mind! This comes in particularly handy for busting the two of them out of jail. However, they soon discover that they're caught up in a huge conspiracy, and Temporo, Inc. is only a piece of the puzzle. Not only is all of time in danger, James may be a key part of it!
The Time Stone is a sci-fi adventure in which ordinary people overcome immense odds not only in an attempt to save the world but various people across time and space. However, while the overall plot is intriguing, the book absolutely didn't live up to any of the expectations I had for it. For starters, these two "ordinary people" (who eventually team up with two additional folks) are able to not only survive things like battles with six ninjas wielding weapons, but overcome so well that I never once felt scared for their well-being. The four characters also have minimal personalities - sure James has special abilities, Tina is the silly one and the other two (a Temporo, Inc. insider and an archaeologist) have a few quirks of their own, but their dialogue is almost entirely interchangeable to such an extent that sometimes I didn't get why Tina would be the one saying something crazy scientific or the girl who was fluent in numerous languages wouldn't be able to translate something that someone else was easily able to.
On top of the ridiculous action, the plot seems to wander all over the place. The book is listed twice on Amazon - one with 447 pages and another with 332. In either case, the book is far too long and once it lost my attention a few chapters in it never grabbed it again. For a while the chapters flipped between the "good guys" and the "bad guys", and it even seemed like Broad, one of the main antagonists, was considering giving up his evil ways, but that plot quickly dissolved into nothing and the chapters focused entirely on the heroes. I can typically read a book in a day or two, and a book of this length may take a few days more if it doesn't hold my attention, but I took nearly a whole month with this one because I kept putting it off.
Finally, something I'd normally consider pretty major but was minor in comparison to the rest of my issues - I caught almost 100 errors in the book while I read it. I wasn't thoroughly editing or looking out for errors mind you, these were blatant, easy-to-find errors like extra spacing with punctuation, using the wrong word or swapping tense repeatedly in a sentence. It really didn't bother me so much in this case, though, as the entire book was so faulty that it sort of fit with the rest.
My rating of The Time Stone by Jeffrey Estrella is 1 out of 4 stars. I wanted to like this book - the plot and genre were right up my alley! However, the nearly nonexistent plot, lack of character building, errors and length of the book just absolutely killed it for me. The only positive I can think of is that there were a few times the humor worked fairly well, but that's buried in numerous other attempts at humor that fell flat. Jeffrey came up with a pretty solid basis for his plot, but sadly all the rest needs work.
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The Time Stone
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