The Leveller by Julia Durango. Rating: 3 Stars.
Premise: Nixy Bauer pulls kids out of the virtual reality world called MEEP for their parents’ hard earned cash. One day, the creator of MEEP calls on her to pull his son out of the VR game when his top programmers can’t get to him.
I was so excited for the premise of this book. I had never heard of it before and it was a quick add on from Book Outlet for free shipping. BUT the premise just sounds amazing. A little Ready Player One, a little less internalized misogyny, a little bounty hunter, I was ready for it. And on a lot of these fronts it delivered. Not so much for some of them.
I think my chief complaint is that I felt like nothing was fleshed out. There needed to be so much more world building than there was. The author was in such a rush to get us to “the action” that we really missed out on the world building. Plus a lot of the action scenes at first just go by way too fast. I wish there were more details there. Having just now finished this book I’ll say something I thought very early on: this book is only 245 pages long but it could very easily break 400 pages without dragging. It would have done so much more for me if the author had done more world building, added more details to the action sequences, gave a build up to this very minor romance that happens at the end.
There is also the problem that this book is obviously setting up for another book. Especially in the last chapter. That last chapter was nothing but set up. And the publishers didn’t get another book in this world from this author. Or the author wasn’t allowed to write another one. One of the two. Which is really too bad because I could see myself continuing on with this story even though it lacks a lot of the things that could have made it great.
Either way, I thought the premise was great and I loved escaping into this world between two heavy Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels. Definitely a great palate cleanser if that’s what you need, but also just a fun time.
