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A review by gmwells
The Stray by Jason M. Ford
3.0
I'm going to start this off by saying that I am glad to have been able to be among the first to read this book. It kept me on my toes, the chapters varied in length and had vivid descriptions, and overall it's a pretty good read. You'll love this book if you like dystopian future mixed with Synths from Fallout 4.
However, The Stray seems a bit... incomplete, if you will. The story is a little too fast-paced and has the reader jumping ahead through time almost every paragraph, at times. It's great if you like that sort of thing, but it's really not up my alley. The author also seemed to switch back and forth between voices and genres. One chapter, it's a romantic comedy, the next it's a dystopian thriller. Again, it's really great if you like that sort of thing, but I, for one, do not. Some authors can really pull off mixing together multiple genres, but the way that he presented it just seemed confused.
There's also a couple of unnecessary explanations that could've been left up to the reader to decipher. I often found myself skipping over the incredibly long paragraphs explaining things that I had already inferred or things that I would eventually come to assume.
What's strange is that there are longer chapters with tons of unnecessary explanations (and even sometimes unnecessary descriptions), and then there are short chapters that are so short, they seem completely unnecessary to the storyline - almost as though they were added as an afterthought.
I wish that I could rate this book more than three stars, but I really can't bring myself to do it. The author seems generally confused about how his voice should sound throughout the story.
Despite all of the negative aspects, I really quite enjoyed some of the passages in this book. I've gotten more than a few wise quotes from these pages and I found the story itself rather insightful. If you overlook some of the fallbacks, you'll find a really amazing and creative story.
However, The Stray seems a bit... incomplete, if you will. The story is a little too fast-paced and has the reader jumping ahead through time almost every paragraph, at times. It's great if you like that sort of thing, but it's really not up my alley. The author also seemed to switch back and forth between voices and genres. One chapter, it's a romantic comedy, the next it's a dystopian thriller. Again, it's really great if you like that sort of thing, but I, for one, do not. Some authors can really pull off mixing together multiple genres, but the way that he presented it just seemed confused.
There's also a couple of unnecessary explanations that could've been left up to the reader to decipher. I often found myself skipping over the incredibly long paragraphs explaining things that I had already inferred or things that I would eventually come to assume.
What's strange is that there are longer chapters with tons of unnecessary explanations (and even sometimes unnecessary descriptions), and then there are short chapters that are so short, they seem completely unnecessary to the storyline - almost as though they were added as an afterthought.
I wish that I could rate this book more than three stars, but I really can't bring myself to do it. The author seems generally confused about how his voice should sound throughout the story.
Despite all of the negative aspects, I really quite enjoyed some of the passages in this book. I've gotten more than a few wise quotes from these pages and I found the story itself rather insightful. If you overlook some of the fallbacks, you'll find a really amazing and creative story.