Book Review: Adept ; Ex Machina by Robert Finn

Adept ; Ex Machina by Robert Finn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Okay so this was books one and two sandwiched in one cover.

Adept (book 1)

So from reading the back of this book I though that this could be a really good story as there appeared to be potential for this to have a really unique story line and be really gripping. However I don't feel that things went that way, hence me only giving this two stars.

The book was a bit slow at getting started. I got nearly 200 pages in and as much as I could see where the story was heading, I didn't get the point of it all. In hindsight that should of told me how little I was going to enjoy the rest of this book.

Sometimes descriptions are a bit overdone - like when you're at school and the teacher tells you to add more descriptive words and you end up abusing description by writing any big fancy sounding word you can think of; it got tedious and sounded like the writer was trying to hard. So points for effort, but not for execution.

Even after finishing Adept, I don't care about the characters. If they had all died I wouldn't be all that bothered by it. It was obvious who the good guys and the bad guys where, but I didn't find myself rooting for either side. We know that Susan is American and blonde, but aside from this we don't really know anything about who she is as a person. Why does she do what she does? Why did she decide to move to England to work? Ultimately we don't really know (or in my opinion we don't) why she was in the place she was at to become a player in this story. We also know little about David. What is David's history? What's with the martial arts? How'd he get into what he does as a job? I get the impression that it's not what he wants to be doing, nor does it seem like something that he enjoys. So what motivates him? I found this lack of back story on the characters made it hard to connect with them.

So by the point of basically being half way through Adept, the story could have been wrapped up quite nicely (and to be honest I was stating to run out of patients with the book)But I still had another 250 odd pages to go before I reached the next book. I kept reading. I thought 'Hey maybe there is going to be some nifty plot twist that I didn't see coming!' There wasn't (feel free to disagree with me). By the time that I reached the end I felt like it was all being dragged out way too much, and it had become a chore to finish.

Some of the reviews on the back of the book are throwing around words and phrases like "Fast paced", "Witty", "Carefully plotted", "Humour" . Personally I would disagree; except maybe on the "carefully plotted" part. It is carefully plotted; perhaps to a fault.


Ex Machina

If this hadn't have been in the same book I wouldn't have even picked it up after reading Adept. For some odd reason though I made an attempt at reading it. I say attempt because I didn't finish it. For the first time in I don't know how long, I gave up on a book.

This is the first fiction book that I have read that has foot notes. Yes, you read that correctly FOOT NOTES. The character who's perspective this is from is irritating. It feels like a she is constantly whining about something and then goes off to the pub to drown her sorrows with many glasses of wine and various other alcoholic beverages.

It became a chore to finish Adept and I have run out of patients to even want to try and finish Ex Machina.

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