Afbeelding auteur

Terry Miles

Auteur van Rabbits

13 Werken 522 Leden 27 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Bevat de naam: Terrance Miles

Werken van Terry Miles

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Geboortedatum
20th Century
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
Canada
Geboorteplaats
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada

Leden

Besprekingen

dnf at 67%, tiring repetitive clue hunting, maybe palatable as YA
 
Gemarkeerd
postsign | 24 andere besprekingen | Dec 28, 2023 |
The Quiet Room by Terry Miles is a very highly recommended mystery following players in a secret world-wide alternate reality game. This is the second novel set in the world of the Rabbits podcast. The underground alternate game called Rabbits crosses inter-dimensional streams in the multiverse.

Why would the mysterious Rabbit Police be questioning Emily Connors when she appears to be trapped in a dimensional stream where the game Rabbits does not exist. Whether it is the universe she is in or the game itself, something feels off. Or is there some underlying conspiracy underway? If the game is still on, this would be the twelfth iteration. Emily came close to winning the eleventh, but has the next game started in her current dimensional stream?

Rowan Chess, a theme park designer, has never felt like he was in the right place, or totally part of the reality he lives in. This feeling continues when he begins to have some incredibly odd experiences. He has a blind date that is going very well when his date goes to the bathroom and disappears. This marks the start of Rowan being forced into a game he knows nothing about. And Emily was "coincidentally" there to witness Rowan's date disappear, but there is no happenstance in Rabbits. What will happen when Rowan meets Emily and other Rabbits players?

The writing is excellent. There are many of the same elements that I loved from the first novel. We have puzzles and clues, mysterious Rabbit Police, theories, enigmas, patterns, and oddities. There are also a plethora of references to all manner of literature, movies, music, pop culture, and gaming. Following clues and noticing any deviations is vital to the game and the novel.

Rabbits is a great sci-fi mystery series that will have readers questioning every little coincident, anomaly, and oddity in their lives while wondering if they are obscure clues they need to uncover something else. The Quiet Room could be read as a stand alone, but then you would want to go back and read Rabbits anyway, so I'd suggest starting with Rabbits and then jump into The Quiet Room. I'm all in for any and all future novels in this incredible series!

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Del Rey via NetGalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2023/09/the-quiet-room.html
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Gemarkeerd
SheTreadsSoftly | 1 andere bespreking | Sep 23, 2023 |
There’s a game that may not really be a game. Players aren’t supposed to talk about it, at least not in specific terms. They call it Rabbits, and playing involves finding patterns in the world around you, coincidences or even discrepancies. Follow the clues and try to win, because winning means unimaginable rewards that no one knows for sure exist, just like no one knows for sure who the winners of the first 10 iterations of the game were. A man named K has been obsessed with the game for years, so when he’s approached by a man rumored to have won in the past and told that something is wrong with the game, and it’s up to K to fix it before the next iteration begins or the entire world is in danger, of course he has to try to help. But will he be too late?

The synopsis of this book (which is better written than mine above) really intrigued me. I loved the idea of a mysterious game with the entire world—universe, even—as the playing field. Unfortunately, the book was mostly just bizarre and repetitive and lacked the real punch and follow-through I was looking for. I read the book pretty quickly, not because I was excited and caught up in it, but because I was confused and a little frustrated and wanted to push to get to that place where everything is explained and suddenly makes sense. Sadly, that moment never happened.

After the possible former winner approaches K and tells him that he has to fix the game, the story mostly consists of the same format repeated over and over–K (and sometimes his friend Chloe too) researches/digs/looks for clues, hits a dead end and gives up, suddenly has a revelation that generally comes one of two ways—either someone randomly gives him a clue or he just happens to see a random item in the room he’s in that makes him think in a new way—then is off digging again before hitting that next dead end. During this repetitive meat of the book, K is remarkably knowledgeable about almost everything he needs to know to solve these things. He has to look up one or two things, but for the most part, he’s versed in movies, music, & books (foreign and domestic), art, architecture, and constellations. No real reason is given for him having all of this knowledge (he has an eidetic memory, but he’d still have to have been exposed to a lot), and to make it worse, the fellow-sort-of-player that is helping him through all of this, Chloe, never really has the surprising and sudden knowledge at just the right time.

K has a lot of strange things happen to him throughout the course of this book, and Chloe often asks him if he’s okay. Even after he’s admitted to her some of the mind-bending things that he’s seen, he still inevitably lies to her when she checks on him and tells her he’s okay. Literally every time, it’s, “I’m fine,” with almost no variation. And then there’s the heavy language throughout the book. Even when I was in high school, I knew that people who liked to drop the f-word into every other sentence didn’t have much in the way of a vocabulary. Apparently that is the case with every single character in this book, without even the allowance for the possibility that anyone they meet along the way may not talk the same way that everyone else does. I don’t read a lot of books with heavy language like this, but never before have I gotten to the point where it felt like the author was an 11-year-old who was out of hearing of his parents and cussing just because he can. That’s what this made me feel like.

Even with everything I’ve said above, I probably would have given the book a little higher of a rating if it weren’t for the utter lack of a payoff in the end. There’s this science presented in the 2nd half of the book that was pretty baffling to me, but I was hanging in there, doing my best to understand just enough to see how the plot paid off. I’m not sure how much of what didn’t make sense to me was due to my lack of understanding of this kind of thing and how much was due to the author sort of hand-waving some of it, but I was hanging in there. Then we get to the end and…all of that, all of the science and urgency, is just…brushed off. We’re presented with 2 new theories about what’s been happening, and then the book ends with no real answers and with everything I was doing my best to understand is just thrown out the window. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like a book wasted the time it took me to read it more than this one did, and the only reason it’s 2 stars is because I really do think the idea is good, the beginning was good, and I’m sure a lot of work was put into writing and editing this book.

As for whether or not you might like it…if you’re a major gamer, into fringe culture, or know anything at all about the darknet, you really might like this book. It reminded me of Ready Player One, in that there were quite a few references to movies, music, and games, a lot of it vintage. And like RPO, a lot of it was completely unnecessary. A major setting in the book is an arcade, and when a character just happens to be leaning on a game cabinet, I don’t need to know what the name of the game is unless it’s going to matter to the story. On the other hand, my husband would probably love to know because he spent a lot of time in arcades as a kid (he also liked all of the references in RPO more than I did). So definitely make the decision for yourself, if this book sounds interesting. You can also check out other reviews on this site.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me a copy of this book to review.
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Gemarkeerd
Kristi_D | 24 andere besprekingen | Sep 22, 2023 |
I received a review copy of this through NetGalley and had to go back and reread the first Rabbits because enough time had passed that I'd forgotten some details. It helped, a little, but the frame reestablishing only went so far. I've not listened to the podcast and admit that I still have some wonders about Rabbits.

This read like a middle book of a trilogy (and the cliffhanger tells us there will be another - sign me up!) Pace was slower, the twists fewer, the trickling of information just enough to further the story and lead speculation as to what's coming. Still, nicely done.

“They’re getting bolder,” Scarpio said, as he reached down into the fridge and pulled out a Corona. He twisted off the cap and handed the bottle to Emily, along with a pre-cut slice of lime from a bowl in the crisper. Then he took the Heineken from her other hand and opened it with a fizzy click.
{Rich guy drinks beer with a twist of cap. And from the bottle. Sigh.}

“There’s coffee. I made pour over, like an asshole. You want one?”
{So… crap beer, but good coffee.}

“You know I don’t need this shit,” Scarpio said, semiserious. “I could be in the South of France right now drinking four-thousand-dollar bottles of burgundy.”
{Um…}

And for the publisher/editor:
Page 49ish of my ecopy
“Sometimes it’s important to remember that both coincidence and confirmation bias do actually exist,” she added.
{Confirmation bias here should probably be availability heuristic.}

Page 236ish
"Looks like a company that makes car axels?"
Typo. Should be axles
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Gemarkeerd
Razinha | 1 andere bespreking | Jun 29, 2023 |

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Statistieken

Werken
13
Leden
522
Populariteit
#47,610
Waardering
½ 3.6
Besprekingen
27
ISBNs
22
Talen
2

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