The Dark Planet by Patrick Carman
He was so proud of him and all that he’d done, proud enough to never call him his maker again.
The Dark Planet is the conclusion to Patrick Carman’s Atherton trilogy about a young boy, Edgar, and his adventures while finding out who his father really was. Along the way he makes numerous friends on Atherton, and the Dark Planet itself. He knows he was made for a purpose, he knows he doesn’t have real parents like everyone else, he knows his maker went to a great deal of trouble to save a handful of people on a made world. What he doesn’t know is that his adventures aren’t over yet.
The Dark Planet is written nicely. The characters are deep, the settings detailed, and the plot very well thought out. The main problem I found was that the first two thirds of the book went too slowly. You could see that plot developing, but it was getting nowhere fast. It was not, in other words, thrilling.
However, the last third of the book was stupendous. The plot tightened up, the characters came alive, there was edge-of-your-seat action, suspense, and at the end the feelings flowed out of the characters and it was hard to tear my eyes off the page. The beginning: boring. The end: awesome.
A good conclusion to a lovely trilogy, especially the conclusion of the conclusion.
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi A brilliant and varied collection of mostly-SF stories, many of which focus on the interactions…
Childhood's End- Arthur C. Clarke
The only genre book I read last month was The Ghost Book, a 1926 anthology compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith,…
Best fiction I read in April was Ian C. Esslemont's new Malazan book, Forge of the High Mage. Best non-fiction…
I read the first four books in the "Children Of the Lamp" series by P.B. Kerr. The name of the…