Friday 14 August 2015

The Forever Watch - David Ramirez.

Hey guys!
Joe here with a new review for you all! J

Today I’m going to be reviewing David Ramirez’s book ‘The Forever Watch’.

Here’s a little snippet of the blurb to get you intrigued:
All that is left of humanity is on a thousand-year journey to a new planet aboard one ship, The Noah, which is also carrying a dangerous serial killer...
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I received this book as a review copy through BookBridgr.

Yeah, so, honestly I don’t think this book knew know what it was or what it intended to become.

I pushed this book back in my reading pile mostly due to all the negative comments/reviews I had seen pop up, but I figured now was the time to tackle it head-on.
And I did, I very much did.

The only problem was that I didn’t really enjoy it as much as I thought I would’ve?
Like I said, I put it off – but that did not bias my views as I went in with a fresh mind.

The first 50 to 70 pages of the book are exceptionally good!

I liked the ‘power’ elements in this book.
How a talent someone has can be excelled and greatened using amplifiers that route to their implants that re-route the ships raw energy.
There are a few talents we learn about during the book such as Touch, Bruiser, Medic and a few others! (There are probably more but we only learn about a select few because of the main characters)

The people in this story have certain sections of their face marked with certain symbols to indicate a certain power and they also have chrome plates embedded into certain places to signify the implant power they have.

The world building within these pages was really-really well done! How the author describes the Noah and the Habitats that all the people live in really allows the book to flesh out a little and to really stretch our minds to imagine the impossible situations these people are living through.

The writing was a little hard to get to grips with as it was mostly science jargon; I am a huge science enthusiast, but I generally didn’t understand a good amount of the words and I had to Google a few of them to actually understand the meaning.
Other than that the writing seemed to flow quite rapidly.

I liked how Humans in this story are all fitted with an Implant that allows them to use the ‘Nth Web’, create almost secret communication between links to other implants, and also buy memories! Which I thought was awesome!!

I liked how we were introduced to the main characters quite quickly, instead of slowly learning little things about them, which most probably would change our views on them at the end. Especially peoples powers; I really liked the idea of people having these chrome plates in their skin which represent their talent/power.
I was speaking to a friend about old sci-fi novels/movies and he pointed out that Chrome and Silver were used back in older pieces to represent their future, where-as now we mostly innovate extra colour and vibrancy into objects and places. So the chrome plates were a good touch! J

The only problem I had with Hana (The main character) is that she was the generic OP character, excelled at nearly everything, had top scores in all her Touch Abilities, etc. She was almost perfect in everyway, which made me slowly start to loathe her.

THEN!
Then came the rest of the book.

I generally don’t understand what happened.
It really seems to me like the writer thought ‘Lets get super creative and super complex now!’

Everything started getting slower and slower within the pacing for this book.
We started learning more about Hana’s office life and sex life more than any kind of plot as to why people are being murdered?
We’d get about 2 paragraphs of Hana and her lover Barrens searching the web and tracking clues to be followed by 4 chapters on how work is boring and how parties are weird and how her sex-life is super amazing!

I just honestly wasn’t expecting it and it made me feel really uncomfortable reading it? It sounds really silly I know, but the way the author wrote the love scenes in, made it seem like he was forced to? The romance with Hana and Barrens was very dry and very emotionless. Whenever she kept calling him ‘My Lion’ or ‘My Knight’ I shrivelled up a little inside and crawled away from the book.
They were just so very cringy.

Nearer the end of the book we start to see more Sci-Fi appear in the book, but even then it’s slow and dry and really time-consuming.

Although; the world-building throughout the whole book seemed to be very strong and very prominent; as though the author devoted a particularly longer time fine-tuning the world rather than everything else.

The author added in so many Sci-Fi elements (Aliens, Mutants, AI, Powers, Space in general) that it just became so very packed. It was really hard to grasp an understanding on what was going on.
And the science jargon expanded to nearly every sentence; so I had hardly any clue on what anyone was explaining.

The last thing I have a big issue with is the Blurb.
On the blurb (of the physical book) it just describes Hana’s run-ins with ‘Mincemeat’ and how she’s a searching for a truth that will uncover deep, dark secrets.
NOT once does it mention how Barrens brings her to speed on the findings, How they will dive into a wealth of deep-space knowledge.

There were a few loops within this book that were not tied properly and story lines which were just placed in with stoppers that just felt like filler.

Overall, I generally liked the first third of the book, which had a strong, paced and well-detailed start that just spiralled down into an oblivion of slow, draining reading.

I hope you enjoyed my review!


Thank you again to Bookbridgr for sending me this book to review!

And thank you to you for reading this review!

See ya on the flip side guys!

Joe J

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