Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by elliereadsromantasy
Mirage by Somaiya Daud
2.0
I'd heard so many good things about this book and I really, truly tried to give it a fair chance, but I just didn't enjoy it. I did manage to finish it, and I enjoyed exactly one character (Maram) which is why it gets 2 stars.
This reads like a first draft rather than a polished novel. This is surprising to me, since it's a debut novel, and although I know very little about the publishing world I would have thought that debuts would be strictly edited before being deemed worthy of release. But this copy suffers from glaring grammatical errors and poor word choices that, in one particular chapter, were so distracting that I honestly considered keeping a record of the errors and forwarding on a list of corrections to the publisher (is that a thing people do?).
For such a compact book (my edition is 308 pages) this story is incredibly repetitive and uneventful. The main character, Amani, often spends time pondering things at length and coming to certain (usually wrong) conclusions; and then a couple of chapters later will discuss the same issue with another 'character' and end up coming to the exact same conclusions, always seeming surprised by her 'new' revelations. The resulting impression is that the author wrote certain scenes out of chronological order and had simply forgotten about them, so they managed to sneak their way into the final edit. There are many examples of this.
The one thing about this story that is marginally well-done is Maram's character and the development of the relationship between her and Amani: but again, here I am more struck by the potential than by the reality of what's presented to me on the page. Amani has the same 'realisation' about Maram so many times that I actually began to count them (final count is FIVE).
The 'science fiction' elements of this book seem like simple gimmicks in order to make it more unique. There was no real reason for Amani's homeworld to be a moon, and the droids which act as servers and handmaidens don't do anything particularly droid-like (on the flip side, Amani's human handmaiden is so incredibly bland that she might as well be a droid). In one of the final chapters of the book one of the characters is mentioned to be carrying a 'phaser' and I was incredibly surprised because I had genuinely forgotten that that was something that could exist in this world (phasers are never mentioned again and any other weapon that is seen is a conventional one). The book also can't really decide what sort of timeframe it exists in. In one scene Amani is impressed by an 'ancient' city with architecture that reveals itself to be "probably a thousand years old" because of its obvious antiquity (the roads aren't wide enough for carriages to pass); in another scene she unashamedly boasts (twice!) about a library that was standing for "two hundred thousand years" before being sacked by invaders.
I'm being harsh, yes, but only because I had such high hopes and it was painful to see them summarily dashed over and over again. I won't be continuing with the series.
This reads like a first draft rather than a polished novel. This is surprising to me, since it's a debut novel, and although I know very little about the publishing world I would have thought that debuts would be strictly edited before being deemed worthy of release. But this copy suffers from glaring grammatical errors and poor word choices that, in one particular chapter, were so distracting that I honestly considered keeping a record of the errors and forwarding on a list of corrections to the publisher (is that a thing people do?).
For such a compact book (my edition is 308 pages) this story is incredibly repetitive and uneventful. The main character, Amani, often spends time pondering things at length and coming to certain (usually wrong) conclusions; and then a couple of chapters later will discuss the same issue with another 'character' and end up coming to the exact same conclusions, always seeming surprised by her 'new' revelations. The resulting impression is that the author wrote certain scenes out of chronological order and had simply forgotten about them, so they managed to sneak their way into the final edit. There are many examples of this.
The one thing about this story that is marginally well-done is Maram's character and the development of the relationship between her and Amani: but again, here I am more struck by the potential than by the reality of what's presented to me on the page. Amani has the same 'realisation' about Maram so many times that I actually began to count them (final count is FIVE).
The 'science fiction' elements of this book seem like simple gimmicks in order to make it more unique. There was no real reason for Amani's homeworld to be a moon, and the droids which act as servers and handmaidens don't do anything particularly droid-like (on the flip side, Amani's human handmaiden is so incredibly bland that she might as well be a droid). In one of the final chapters of the book one of the characters is mentioned to be carrying a 'phaser' and I was incredibly surprised because I had genuinely forgotten that that was something that could exist in this world (phasers are never mentioned again and any other weapon that is seen is a conventional one). The book also can't really decide what sort of timeframe it exists in. In one scene Amani is impressed by an 'ancient' city with architecture that reveals itself to be "probably a thousand years old" because of its obvious antiquity (the roads aren't wide enough for carriages to pass); in another scene she unashamedly boasts (twice!) about a library that was standing for "two hundred thousand years" before being sacked by invaders.
I'm being harsh, yes, but only because I had such high hopes and it was painful to see them summarily dashed over and over again. I won't be continuing with the series.