I didn’t hate this book. It was interesting enough to keep me going to the end. There were enough questions I wanted answered that I kept going. I didn’t hate this book. Unfortunately, after finishing the book, I’m mostly left with a laundry list of the things that irritated me about it:
1. I realize that authors have pretty much no say in the cover art that goes on the book, but could we at least get someone that’s read the book get the final say? I liked the cover to this book. It has a women climbing on tree limbs in the midst of what looks like a large city sized computer. Now, there are large trees, and large cities in this book. However, they do not met in fashion remotely similar to the cover. So, my attraction to the book was a lie.
2. Same thing with the jacket description. The last journey of the book, into the heart of the forest, had an entirely different flavor than what I’d been lead to believe from the jacket description. It’s not wrong. The tone was just off.
3. I hate it when I find out after the fact that large chunks of the back story of a novel were taken care of in another novel, or short stories. I only found out in the acknowledgements at the end of this book that several back story features had been covered in some of the author’s prior short stories. These elements certainly were not integral to the actual novel as it progressed, but several were strange enough that I wasn’t overly happy to not actually get a more detailed description by the end of the book.
So, would I recommend this book to others, or read more by this author. I’ll reserve judgment until I see his next jacket cover.