Reviewed by -- Rich
M.
Book Review of -- This
Changes Everything by Sally
Ember
My overall star rating
--- 1
About the book:
Dr. Clara Ackerman Branon, 58, begins having secret visits from holographic representations of beings from the Many Worlds Collective, a consortium of planet and star systems in the multiverse. When Earth is invited to join the Collective, the holos choose Clara as liaison between Earth and the Many Worlds Collective to make the secret visits public and guide Earth's new leaders. While Earthers adjust their beliefs and ideas about life, religion, culture, identity and everything they think and are, rebellions and conflicts arise. The Collective works with Clara to create the Psi-Warriors who fight the leaders of the resistance, the Psi-Defiers. With multiple re-sets needed to revise the past and future to save lives, in which of the timelines in the multiverse does her love, Epifanio Dang, get to be with Clara? Over Clara's thirty-year term as Chief Communicator, Earthers must undergo major transformations.
Book creation ratings:
Overall total -- 7 out
of a possible 30
-- Story &
characters -- 1
-- Cover & title
-- 1
-- Editing &
formatting -- 5
* based on a 1-10
scale with: 1-4, poor; 5-7, good; 8-10,
very good.*
The review --
Confusing and dense.
That’s the big thing about this book. A reader doesn’t know if this should be
metafictional, metaphysical, or what?
The author seems to be aiming for
something along the lines of Fringe or some similar concept using alternate
worlds, but goes into from the wrong way (at least to me, and I’m someone who
can tell you who lived on Earth-2, Earth-X, Earth-616, and easily followed the
dimension jumping in Heinlein’s books). This is one of many books that I’ve
read recently that attempts to be “multimedia” and fails horribly.
Many
chapters are prefaced or consist of media-style transcripts of conferences and
the like, that, had they been formatted a little differently from the main
narrative (assuming that can be found here), they would’ve added a bit more to
the story. As it is, it’s more of a mess than anything else.
This is perhaps
the first book that I have ever found to be offensive. I have no problem with
most things; hell, you can write about fisting nuns and putting kittens into
woodchippers while wearing Nazi regalia, and if it’s interesting, I’ll have no
problem with it. And I can understand wanting to key the story into major
real-life events, but to conclude that Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, and
the Columbia’s destruction were due to “memory lapses” is OFFENSIVE to the
brave and talented people who died in those tragedies. That simple passage put
me completely off this piece of crap book, and anything this writer WILL EVER
write in the future. She is a non-entity from now
on.
I attempted to read another
20% or so into the book, but nothing really improved. The book isn’t really worth wasting my time
on. Let me give you a little background: I've read nearly 800 books over the
past two-and-a-half years. I've finished
every single one of them, good or bad. Except this
one.
Reader Recommendations
Genre -- (supposedly)
Science fiction
Age recommendations --
Adult
Sex content rating -- n/a
Violence rating -- n/a
Links for the book:
Buy it on Amazon
Author's Amazon page
Author's facebook page
Author's website
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