The Electric Kingdom - Cora Lewis-Patterson

    I have been getting the feeling that I should be more critical of the books I read, so here is my best attempt at that. The Electric Kingdom has many issues. By far the worst thing about this book is that it has multiple typos. I can name at least three different pages where I was completely dumbfounded by the mess of letters in sentences. There is no other book that I can name that I have stumbled across that has had more than one typo. This really threw me off and made me enjoy the book quite a lot less. Another issue I found within the book is that while reading three of the seven different parts of it, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I admit that it is all explained better once you start reading further into it, but I must say that being completely confused on what was happening for the first, give or take 40 pages of the book was not making me want to continue reading. One specific contributing factor to my confusion was that at first the characters’ point of view kept switching back and forth before I was really able to distinguish who all of the characters were. It was just hurting my head trying to keep up with all of the sudden switches, although it did soon become clear who was who. My final critique that I will be writing about is the mentions of Harry Potter. This is not an actual big issue obviously, but I know many people, including myself, do not enjoy it when people say phrases such as “Hufflefuck” unironically. Beware of this book if you do not want to read Millennial-style Harry Potter jokes. 

    Despite the many flaws of this book, there were still certain aspects that I did enjoy. The overall plot of it was very refreshing. I enjoyed the fact that there were next to zero extra characters (totally surprising for a book about a virus that wiped out most of humanity). It helped a lot when referring back to previous characters and actually being able to know who they are. Another thing I enjoyed about the characters was that they were mostly adolescents. I personally am not a fan of reading books mainly centered around adults, so having the main characters practically all be teenagers was nice. The ending, (although slightly confusing) did have me wanting to keep reading and continue along the journey of the main character, Nico. If there is a sequel to this book that I don’t know about, I would probably read it.

    I would give this book 2.5/5 stars. Although it was messy and confusing in many, many parts, I overall did end up enjoying it. If you are okay with making a lot of exceptions when reading a book and you enjoy sci-fi/dystopian style, then I would recommend giving The Electric Kingdom a shot.