2010; 252 pages. Book 1 (out of 3) in the Socket Greeny series. New Author? : No. Genres: Techno-thriller; Fantasy; Science
Fiction; Virtual Reality; Teen & Young Adult. Overall Rating : 7*/10.
There’s something to be said for “normal”.
Unfortunately for Socket
Greeny, he only realized how much he appreciated a normal life once it was
taken away.
“Normal” for Socket used to be hanging out and going on VR (Virtual Reality)
quests with his high school buddies
Chute and Streeter. They made a pretty
good team, particularly when they hacked into other people’s virtual game
worlds, slaughtered the sims there, and made off with lots of Experience Points. Sometimes their own sims got killed, of course,
but hey, that just meant Socket and his friends got kicked back into the real
world to rebuild their sims and try again.
Alas, this time they’ve hacked into
a new game world called The Rime, and things
are going horribly wrong. The line
between the real and virtual worlds seems to have blurred, and all of a sudden
they’re feeling the pain of their sims’ wounds.
It’s almost as if someone
deliberately set a trap for them.
What’s To Like...
The “real world” portion of The Discovery of Socket Greeny is set in and
around Charleston, South Carolina, which happens to be the author’s
stomping grounds. However, a lot of the story
takes place in the virtual dimension, both the standard internet
role-playing type and a special sort of otherworld with strange creatures and different laws of physics.
The story takes place at some point
slightly in our future. Socket Greeny’s
high school life seems normal enough, but muggles (to
borrow a term from J.K. Rowling) have some neat new technological
gadgets, including transplanter discs, lookits, and way-kewl gizmos called
nojakks, which I gather is some kind of implanted cell-phone.
The title can refer to
either Socket’s discovery of another “hidden” world, or that’s
world’s discovery of the latent talents of Socket. Books Two and Three in the (completed)
trilogy are titled The Training of Socket Greeny
and The Legend of Socket Greeny, which gives some idea of where the overarching storyline is headed.
There’s no shortage of new
creatures to meet and greet: grimmets, servys, dupes, crawlers, daddy long legs
(jumbo-sized), lookits, minders, and
paladins. Some are good, some are evil,
and a lot of them are mechanical. This
is both a “chosen one” tale, and a “coming of age” story. It reminded me a lot of the Harry Potter series, which I’m currently working my
way through. Indeed, the sport of tagghet that we encounter here especially reminds me of Harry’s quidditch.
If you’re a Potter-head, I think you’ll enjoy meeting Socket Greeny.
The story is told in the
first-person POV (Socket’s). I have a feeling that his two besties, Chute
and Streeter, will play prominent roles throughout the series, and since Chute’s a
girl, a puppy-love romance may also be in the works. I thought the grimmets and the art of timeslicing were
nice literary touches.
The ending is decent. The Paladin Nation (say what?!) is revealed to our “real world” courtesy of a
climactic battle with some baddies. The
storyline ends at a logical spot, with Socket poised to take the next step in
his newfound career. The last of the 33 chapters is a touching epilogue
that I quite liked.
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.1/5
based on 133 ratings.
Goodreads: 3.69/5 based on 432
ratings and 91 reviews
Excerpts...
Grimmets.
Hmmmm. Tiny dragons
speaking on nojakks, apparently with their mind. We missed that species in biology class. And from the Milky Way? We missed that in astronomy. Of course, we never covered timeslicing in
physics. I reached for Sighter, wanted
to poke him, make sure he was real. He
snapped my finger with his tail, like a wet towel. (loc. 1294)
“You are a genetic mutation and that’s why
so many Paladins are all enthusiastic about you. They love mutations. They have this false hope that nature will
provide the right combination of DNA to improve our race. But if you want to know the truth, you are
just an abnormality, a random chance. If
you think about it, it’s like squirting paint on a canvas hoping it will become
the Mona Lisa.” He twitched. “Do you understand?”
Did I just get insulted? (loc. 1392)
Kindle Details…
The
Discovery of Socket Greeny sells for $2.99 at Amazon right now. The other two books in the series go for
$3.77 apiece. Tony
Bertauski has several other series (most notably his Claus series) with lots of other e-books,
all in the price range of $1.84 to $4.99.
“Have you ever
noticed cockroaches following you?” (loc.
1101)
There are some nits to pick,
but no show-stoppers.
There’s a fair amount of
cussing (18 instances in the first 10%),
but I wouldn’t call that excessive, and it’s nothing a young adult doesn’t hear
every day in high school. I don’t recall
any other R-rated stuff. You’d better like a story with lots of internet-accessing, role-playing, and virtual reality escapades, and not be bored silly with yet another tale where a teenager finds himself called upon to save the world.
There were quite a
few typos, although not to the point of being a distraction. Most of them were “spellchecker errors”: There/They; then/than; wind milling/windmilling,
horde/hoard, and whatnot. The
isle/aisle boo-boo even managed to
show up twice.
But I think most of these
quibbles won't bother the target audience at all: YA readers looking for a lively, fast-reading
story, with lots of action and a bunch of teenagers getting drawn into an
exciting adventure. In that
regard the clever blend of fantasy and sci-fi encountered in The Discovery of Socket Greeny
delivers nicely.
7 Stars. One trivial anecdote. I was impressed by what seemed to be a geezer-music nod in the early going when "Justin Heyward Street" was mentioned. The old prog-rock group The Moody Blues had a guitarist by that name, and I was surprised that Tony Bertauski knew about him. Alas, the last name of the musician was Hayward, not Heyward, so I fear it was just a coincidence.
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