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A review by shannonmarie
Algernon's Anomaly by Valentyne
4.0
I really enjoyed the book and found it to be a very entertaining, quick read. I found them on TikTok promoting a new book coming out soon and decided to read this one in the meantime since it was on amazon unlimited. The author is very good at telling a story and creating interesting characters that I wanted to follow and learn more about.
I will say the conversations between the characters seemed rather unrealistic to me a lot of the times though that may just be the author's style and did not affect my overall entertainment. There was a lot of telling rather than showing throughout the book as well which may be why some dialog seemed unnatural to me. Often throughout there would also be very big tonal shifts from a really intense or sad scene to then suddenly a very happy scene, sometimes within the same chapter. I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing but did catch me off guard a few times. The pacing at the end was also a bit off to me and I found myself caring a lot less about what would happen towards the end of the book.
That being said, for the most part I found myself not wanting to put the book down and was very excited to see what would happen next for the vast majority of the book. I really like the premise of this book and thought it was very interesting. I tore through this book much faster than most books that I read which definitely speaks to the author's skill of keeping the reader's attention. I am a very slow reader so it usually takes me awhile to finish a book but I got through this rather quickly. This author is overall a wonderful and unique storyteller and I look forward to reading more of their works.
I will say the conversations between the characters seemed rather unrealistic to me a lot of the times though that may just be the author's style and did not affect my overall entertainment. There was a lot of telling rather than showing throughout the book as well which may be why some dialog seemed unnatural to me. Often throughout there would also be very big tonal shifts from a really intense or sad scene to then suddenly a very happy scene, sometimes within the same chapter. I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing but did catch me off guard a few times. The pacing at the end was also a bit off to me and I found myself caring a lot less about what would happen towards the end of the book.
That being said, for the most part I found myself not wanting to put the book down and was very excited to see what would happen next for the vast majority of the book. I really like the premise of this book and thought it was very interesting. I tore through this book much faster than most books that I read which definitely speaks to the author's skill of keeping the reader's attention. I am a very slow reader so it usually takes me awhile to finish a book but I got through this rather quickly. This author is overall a wonderful and unique storyteller and I look forward to reading more of their works.