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

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.

View all my reviews