Ridley Pearson

I barely finished this one. Thirty-three percent through and I was speed-reading just to get to the end. I really should have just stopped, but the idea sounded too good not to follow through, like Kingdom Hearts. But it's not worth your time.

The concept is ideal for any Disneyphile-evil lurks in the park and five kids have to stop it, going on rides after close and exploring cast member tunnels and doing all the things you're not allowed to do. Walt Disney World goes from a place of joy to show more a battleground. Anyone who's been to a Disney Park at least once should be intrigued.

But you shouldn't. It's so poorly executed and poorly written. Like it was a rush job. The characters have no depth. They don't even get the depth of stereotypes. No one has a personality. I could not tell you the difference between the two girls of this five person team. And they're barely in the book as it is. Anyone who's not the "team leader" gets barely any screen time. The two other boys are "the big guy" and "the computer guy" but "the big guy" occasionally feeds information about computers and "the computer guy" acts weak and nerdy. No one has internal goals or distinguishing characteristics. Power Rangers had better characterization.

The story is all event. And they throw in some BS about how these kids are "holographic cast members" and that gives them the ability to be in the park after it closes. This is a thing that doesn't exist in the park, and I had to try explaining to my kids five times. It's rooted in science but acts like magic and has no rules around it. It just happens. Once they're in the park, they have to do some lame The Da Vinci Code style sleuthing, because Walt Disney knew that his movies were going to come to life and imprison the guests in dungeons down below. That's a sentence I just said. This fetch quest accomplishes its job of filling out pages by making every obstacle the same--you get on a ride, the ride malfunctions, but you succeed anyway without any lasting consequences. Goalposts are never pushed back.

Kids deserve better than this. The only highlight is seeing the things you saw in Disney World, and only in the "hey I remember that" way.

This is no Percy Jackson or Wimpy Kid. I did not care whether the characters lived or died. And there were too many of them anyway. In addition to the Team of Five, there are two girls with ambiguous motives but the same non-personality, an Imagineer mentor, and "the adults who know nothing". The author can explain the Utilidor under the park, but not why these kids matrix-jump into their holograms when they fall asleep nor how that works. That's like Benedict Cumberbatch doing the mocap for Smaug, then going to sleep and finding himself IN the film. It feels like the author was writing to a deadline or to the specifications of investors and focus groups. Pick up a Travel Guide instead. show less

This book does not deserve the paper it was written on. When middle school kids complain that they do not like to read, or that books are too hard to read, I wouldn't blame them if they were talking about this book.

As a brief illustration of how stupid this book was, behold this magnificent passage:
"Her hair was the color of laundry lint. Her eyelashes were so pale they were almost invisible, which left her eyelids looking like weird flesh-colored cups that blinked down over her eyes like show more a bird's."

"Like a bird's"? Like a bird's what? Like a bird's... flesh-colored cups? How did this line make it past an editor? Also, lint can be purple. It can be red. It can be green or pink or blue. Lint comes in every glorious shade of the rainbow. What then, pray tell, was the color of her hair?

All in all, this book stinks. If you are in middle school, I beg of you, read the Penderwicks or the Melendy books or something that will not discourage you from reading forever. show less

I don't usually read thriller novels but after a few pages of this one, I knew I had found a real writer. You know that feeling when you've run across an author that excels at his art? To me, that feeling is a warm blanket of anticipation. You know you're reading a great book, and letting it play out before you is going to be exhilarating.

This novel, while being #2 in a series of 4, didn't feel like a series book. The characters all seemed fresh and I accredit that to the superb writing. show more

Thrillers have always been an enigma to me because you have to do so many things right to keep the reader involved, while not pulling what I call the "24 Syndrome." The "24 Syndrome" is the art of taking the characters into an unsolvable situation, then using sheer chance to get them out of it, much like Jack Bauer did in the television series, "24."

In short, that pisses me off. It feels cheap and lazy, and I will only give an author one of those before I put the book down and move on.

Ridley Pearson is the real deal. This guy can flat out write. He does a great job of mixing in some flotsam with real clues and devices so that when a twist comes, you didn't see it coming. A lot of times, a plot device is so evident when it's presented, you spend the rest of the novel wondering when the writer's going to come back to it to "solve the problem."

I will be reading much more Ridley Pearson. The jacket said he's the author of more than twenty novels and I can't wait to get started. show less

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Grdankl the Strong, president of Kprshtskan, is plotting to take over the American government. His plan is to infiltrate the science fair at Hubble Middle School, located in a Maryland suburb just outside Washington. The rich kids at Hubble cheat by buying their projects every year, and Grdankl's cronies should have no problem selling them his government-corrupting software. But this year, Toby Harbinger, a regular kid with Discount Warehouse shoes, is show more determined to win the $5,000 prize—even if he has to go up against terrorists to do it. With the help of his best friends, Tamara and Micah, Toby takes on Assistant Principal Paul Parmit, aka "The Armpit", a laser-eyed stuffed owl, and two eBay buyers named Darth and the Wookiee who seem to think that the Harrison-Ford-signed BlasTech DL-44 blaster Toby sold them is a counterfeit. What transpires is a hilarious adventure filled with mystery, suspense, and levitating frogs.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt for the 15th is a choose-you-own day! Wheee, right?

Naw. I hadda go an' eff it all up by making this my Drano book of the month. (You know, the one I read because I'd really rather drink Drano than read this author/genre/what's-it.)

So as expected I hated it. It's a middle-school market book. I didn't like middle-schoolers when I was one, and I like them less now. Vicious little bastards. They're hateful and spiteful and brimful of stupid. Yuck.

It doesn't help that the fake country the co-authors invent, Krpshtskan, is something straight out of Borat. (Remember that movie? Ye gawds.) It also doesn't help that the entire plot is such that Spy Kids begins to resemble Strindberg.

But you're not the audience, comes the cry. No indeed I am not. I am an adult with forty-six years of obsessive reading behind me! And yet others have tutted and tsked because there are those of us who don't want to read YA novels. So this random example, a Kindle special today, got the nod as my test subject. I have a Zilpha Keatly Snyder novel cued up to see if it's just humor that doesn't play well to an older audience. I need a respite before I wade into that one. This could easily be the most wonderful thing a kid could find, so I'm not raggin' on it as itself. It's just so extremely ridiculously grotesquely overblown and overplayed and after all, that's how kids like 'em.

But really, moms and dads, read this before giving kids access to it. Every adult is malevolent or stupid or both. Every authority is deaf, every honest person is reviled by all and sundry. Serious question here: Do you want your kid absorbing this message? That s/he's alone against an uncaring-to-hostile world, with parents that won't listen, teachers that smell bad, take bribes, and collude with enemies of the state?

This isn't good. It panders to an invidious set of stereotypes that reinforce a helpless, whadda-ya-gonna-do passivity and does so with "humor" so it slides down their gullets easier.

This bothers the hell out of me. show less