Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Book Recommendation: The Eye of Minds by James Dashner



I just finished reading this book last night, having read mostly the entire thing in one day. I had bought the book months (maybe a year) ago and I only had the chance to get a few chapters into it before I got busy with school and other things.

One of the reasons it took me so long to finish was because I didn’t think it was that good to start off with. The book starts off slow and not very interesting to it took me a while to actually get into reading it. After I had bought the book, one Youtuber I follow named Joey Graceffa said in a video that he had just finished reading the book and that it underwhelmed him and he didn’t enjoy it very much. This is another reason why I stopped reading the book.

However with all that said and done, once I got to a certain point, I could not put the book down. This was probably about one hundred to one hundred and fifty pages in, which is a good portion of the book considering it’s only three hundred pages long. However, the last portion of the book really hooked me in with all of the action and plot twists and it really made me appreciate the book more than I did before.

What I really loved about this book was the ending. I had a couple of guesses about what was going to happen and I was very close, but I didn’t guess it exactly. I don’t want to give away the ending on here for anyone who wants to read the book, but I will tell you that if you are going to read it, stick around to the end because the ending makes the book worth it. I love the point the book ends on and I would’ve been perfectly happy if it ended there, however knowing that a sequel is coming out fairly soon, I am excited to read it to see what happens next.

To summarize the story, a boy named Michael loves to spend his time inside something called The Sleep, a virtual reality world that feels as real as real life, only you don’t die. His two friends Sarah and Bryson and himself are excellent hackers and use their skills often to manipulate the game to benefit themselves. One day Michael witnesses a girl ripping out her programming from the game and jumping off a bridge, killing herself not only in the game, but in real life as well. He then finds out that a notorious hacker named Kaine is responsible for her death and is holding other people hostage within the game, causing devastating effects to them in their real lives. Michael, Bryson, and Sarah are then asked by the VNS, a sort of virtual police to find Kaine’s base of operations so the VNS can stop whatever he has planned. However, on The Path to find Kaine, the three friends face many challenges and Michael find out something about himself he never knew before.

I would very loosely compare this book to the anime Sword Art Online. The premises of the two are very different, and SAO is heavily based on a romance while The Eye of Minds honestly has not romance in it at all. However I compare the two just because of the fact that they both are set in virtual reality worlds where and evil figure tries to trap people inside.

I would overall give this book a four out of five rating, just because it took me so long to actually get into the plot.

~K.M.D.

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