Book Review: The Eye of Minds by James Dashner

Book: The Eye of Minds by James Dashner
Genre: YA Science Fiction
Rating:★★☆☆☆
For: Fun (and Local Author!)
From: I bought it 

Okay. This book is going to be a hard one to review because I was all over the place with my feelings on it. It was good at first, then it got slow, then it got good then slow, then really fast and then ended with a bang.

So, how would one review that? Maybe I should just say that for me, there was a pacing problem?

But I want to emphasize the "for me" part. I think that a certain crowd of readers will find this book to be a blast. I'm just thinking I don't fit into that crowd.

Here's the story. In this world, people pretty much live in the Virtual Net, the fake world, the video game world. They don't spend much time in their real lives. (Sound familiar? This is a premise of many books I've read lately.) In this world, there's a bad guy who is sabotaging the games and killing the real people. I think. Part of my problem, I will admit, is that I didn't totally understand the villain and his motives.

But, our heroes, a kid and his two friends, have been asked to go find this dude, which means playing a very scary game and going to uncharted parts of the VirtNet (and a part, by the way, that if you die, you really die) and once they find him, the good guys will come in to help them fight and save the world, real and fake.

Make sense?

So in they go and there's lots of weird and scary things they have to get past and figure out. Once they were actually in the game, it picked up a bit for me. Still though. You need to have your awesome kid/game imagination going strong for this one!

But I must say the end was very interesting and I didn't see it coming. It left me with the desire to read on and see what happens next. So. There's that.

This book should have been an easy easy read, and I should have flown right through it. It ended up taking me over a month to read, while I got distracted in between by several other books and Christmas festivities. It was frustrating to me.

Bottom line: So, to sum up, I enjoyed this book in parts. In other parts, I had to force myself through it. That being said, I think video-game-playing-middle-school-age boys will love it! And we need books that they will love, so that's a good thing.

Other Reviews:

On the whole, mind--blown. I liked it a lot. From One Literature Nut

If you like fast-paced action novels with an emphasis on friendship, give this one a read. I promise you won’t regret it! From Good Books and Good Wine

A few flaws with the pacing and occasionally forced dialogue, but an interesting, quick read. From A Patchwork of Books

Things do get a bit too quick at times and it threw me off, but I quickly got back on track. I loved the world that Dashner has built, and the characters! From Book Twirps