2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
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2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
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BOOK REVIEW: Prison of Souls by Xander Grey

Today we’re going to delve into seriously creepy land, via Prison of Souls by Xander Grey. My review copy was graciously provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

Book summary available from Amazon ; book trailer available here. Apparently, I’m the last person in the world to learn that most books have trailer videos now – that’s weird to me. That they exist, I mean, not that I’m the last person to learn of them. That part actually surprises me not at all, since I’m maybe the only person I can think of who hates YouTube. But the former part – that they are a regular part of book marketing – strikes me as unusual, since I tend to think of the YouTube crowd as the exact opposite of the reading crowd. But maybe that’s me being a Luddite. Who knows… Anyway, I digress (as per usual), and shall now stop and refocus.

Xander Grey’s novel is a self-described science-fiction thriller. That it definitely is. It’s also at times a surprisingly thoughtful exegesis on mortality and the self, with a healthy dose of brain-as-hardware-and-software philosophy thrown in for good measure. I loved the opening – the scatter-shot setup was intriguing and grabbed me right from the opening paragraphs. As the story developed, I got sucked further in, trying to figure out what exactly was going on – I love love love when a book does that, keeps me guessing. As long as the guessing is managed, that is – and at times, this one felt a bit like a runaway train… It never got so far ahead of me that I couldn’t keep up, but it did at times feel like there were so many storylines running on so many timelines that I wasn’t entirely sure where the author was trying to take me. It tied up at the end (a little handily, but that’s a comment not a complaint), but some of the ride was a bit bumpier than I expected (again, comment not complaint). That’s not a bad thing per se – there’s nothing worse than a predictable novel, and this was anything but…

There is a lot of original food for thought in this storyline, and that’s not something you can say all that often in this genre. Kudos to Grey for that. Quantum theory is de rigeur for sci-fi these days, and as a result some of it starts feeling stale even when it’s new ground being covered, simply by virtue of the overplay. I didn’t feel that here. The story was unusual, and played out unusually. I liked that about it, a lot. It is what kept me trying to figure things out when they seemed to be playing out in multiple directions simultaneously (or what I thought was simultaneously – and yes, that’s a deliberately vague comment so as not to run into spoiler territory). Then again, maybe my problem was that I kept trying to layer traditional storytelling narrative techniques onto this one to keep things straight in my head – this is a decidedly non-linear ride (again with the vague…) and once I realized that I had a much easier time with the flow. So keep that in the back of your mind, and you’ll be fine… All in all Prison of Souls offers a very intriguing trip down Joshua Briar’s memory lane – there are more secrets than one man has any right to lay claim to, and their unveiling is worth the ride!

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