I haven’t really tried to write a book review, but I was a little bored and had a little time on my hands and I read a lot of books, so I’ve decided to start writing book reviews. Hopefully it’s not too bad, and I’ll try to improve as I go along.
The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks had the misfortune of being read after I finished the most recent book of the Wheel of Time series that I own, which is book 9. For those of you who know, Wheel of Time is very verbose. It’s indulgent on the details and there is a LOT of storyline going on all the time. It’s the one thing I enjoy about reading. Then I’m faced with The Traveler. It is as different as you can get to Robert Jordan’s style of writing. It’s lacking detail left and right. There isn’t any depth to the characters, though the attempt was made, and the story moved along FAR too quickly for my taste. My wife made the point of saying that people just don’t have the attention span to deal with books like Wheel of Time any more. They like an easy read, something quick to read, etc. It’s true. She’s right. But do people need the attention span of a gnat?
I will however give The Traveler a 9 out of 10 for having an interesting storyline. I thought more could be done with it, but hey. It’s the writer’s first novel, so I can’t really say it’s entirely horrible.
What it’s about…SPOILER ALERT.
The Traveler is about a girl, Maya, who grows up being trained as a Harlequin (a secret group of people who protect Travelers from the Tabula, which is an organization bent on destroying Harlequins, Travelers and Pathfinders in order to gain control of the general population). The Tabula are basically a Big Brother. They are watching what everyone is doing, tracking everyone with Personal Link ID and creating patterns of day to day behaviour in order to spot when someone is doing something out of the ordinary. Anyways, so Maya’s father dies and asks her to go to America to protect these two sons of a Traveler. A Traveler is basically someone who can have their neurological presence leave their body and travel through the 4 planes of air, water, fire and earth in order to cross over into the other realms of existance. These Traveler’s are being hunted now by the Tabula in order to make contact with another Realm in order to build a super computer to have even more control over the population. One of the sons actually runs with Maya and both brothers learn to Travel. Then very very shortly later, we arrive near the end where all things collide and you find out what happens with the Travelers, Maya, and the Tabula.
If that’s your kind of story, by all means go read it. But if you like verbose, find another book.