Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Book Review: "Born Lucid: Book 1 of the Born Lucid Series", 2015

Born Lucid: Book 1 of the Born Lucid Series Born Lucid: Book 1 of the Born Lucid Series by Christopher C. Evans
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I started reading this book back in December of 2015 and it took me nearly a year to get this book read. The formating of the book (from present to past to present) really threw me off. I would start getting into the whole "present" story and then get thrown into the past. When I was enjoying the past story, it would go back to the present. It could work for some but for me, it was just distracting.

The story is a good tale for post-apocalyptic genre and for body-enhancing. Of course, the body-enhancing is not due to human changes but through other methods. These methods, I won't tell because that's part of the uniqueness of the story you need to read about, helps the main character and a few like him (in the past) to become almost super-weapons or super-spies. They can work harder, run faster, hear/see better, and all that kind of jazz. When they go to investigate an incident in Europe where one of the talents has gone silent, the main character goes through a gun fight, steals a car, and just does some pretty nifty Bond-type moves. The lost talent is found and revived, but where does the madness end?

In the present, the world has been demolished by war and maybe a higher echelon society, but I'm not sure about that. There are mutants and drones and other things that itch to attack/destroy/eat. The main character, having survived his own past, now is the leader of a group trying to retrieve technology for the purpose of supporting their group. The further down they go into an abandoned underground city, the more his flashbacks come to call on him.

What happened in the past? Where is the group going to go (in the present and towards the future)? No clue. You'd probably have to read the next part of the series to get some final answers.


Aside the whole past-to-present-to-past thing, I had an issue with the grammar. There were times that I found incongruities with the grammar (location of punctuation). Not a major thing but it also distracted me. The change of spelling from one chapter to another was another thing that deterred me from thoroughly enjoying the tale. It wasn't a spelling thing about the characters names but minor words that came up every so often.



3.5/5 - Recommended as a library borrow.
This is a good book to read, but there are distractions too (especially the "when are we" question). The story ends on a good cliffhanger but doesn't give any conclusion about the conflict that the past or present was/is having. The imagination of the author is awesome and the story well detailed, when it wants to be. I would like to read more about the main character and potentially the next book in the series.

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Book Review: "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", 1964

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everyone has seen either the 1971 version of "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" or the 2005 Depp version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". I wanted to read the book to compare it to the movies, so I did.

The reading level of this book is easy and definitely intended towards children. There are sketches in the book to show what Dahl was trying to illustrate with words, which helps slightly as they are rough sketches.

To compare to the movies, the 1971 version was closer to true about Mr. Wonka's strangeness but the 2005 was closer to the book in general. The songs in 2005's movie was spot on with most of the songs in the book, whereas the 1971 version had nothing similar. Both movies had parts that the book didn't have at all (like the 1971's scene of the fizzy lifting drinks, which they only talked about, or the 2005 scenes about Wonka's family life, which was not mentioned at all).

This is a good book to read and it is a quick read. The chapters are short and the words are not challenging. If you want to sit down and read it with your children, go for it. They'll understand [except maybe one of the songs about the gum chewer, not Violet but another person; that song was a bit traumatizing, actually].

Between the 1971 movie and the 2005 movie, they have the book completely covered and then some. Grandpa Joe never worked in the factory, sorry 2005 movie, but he did know about the place. They did talk about the other candy companies trying to steal the recipes and whatnot, but they didn't use a spy [like the 1971 movie] to get the children to act bad. The children were already naturally rotten, aside Charlie. {The Oompa Loompas are NOT orange midgets; they are small "nearly to the knee" beings, but not necessarily all the same appearance, which I disliked in the 2005 movie.}


4/5 - Recommended! Borrow from the library and read with your children, if you have any. If you don't have any children, read it for yourself just to say you did. Share with others!

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{As posted on GoodReads.com}




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