Young Adult Book Review – The Eye of Minds

The Eye of Minds by James Dashner

The Eye of Minds by James Dashner

Title: The Eye of Minds

Author: James Dashner

About: Michael is a gamer who spends most of his time on the VirtNet, which offers total mind and body immersion into a virtual reality world. And his hacking skills just serves to enhance the many gaming options such as fantasy worlds and war games, or even just hanging out with friends. However, recently one hacker has been going beyond the limits of reasonable hacking. He’s been trapping players inside the world, while in reality they have been declared brain-dead. Still, no one knows what he wants. The government, knowing they need a hacker to catch a hacker, has been watching Michael and his friends. However, accepting their top-secret challenge could mean an end to everything they’ve known as they go off the grid, diving into secret areas they never knew existed. And the risk could even include death.

This is one of the few books I never finished. Plot? Sounds really interesting. I’ve always been interested in books involving virtual reality areas or such, and this one seemed to match just that. However, I was quickly disappointed right in the first chapter.

I can’t say much for the characters as I did not have enough time to form an opinion over how well-developed they are. They could be amazing.

I flipped through the book when I first picked it up and was thrilled to see no swearing. (Keep in mind that it was a glance, there may be some I missed.) I was incredibly excited, but in the first chapter, it went awry. Michael has to convince a gamer not to commit virtual suicide. It’s just a part of his duty. However, they describe in detail how this gamer, Tanya, peels open her head to pull out the chip that’s the link between this world and her mind in the real world. It was quite disturbing and a bit gory. And then she ends up jumping off the bridge as well, ending her life in both worlds. Oh, man. That was gross. And the reason I stopped reading.

Overall, this may have been a good book if I had continued. However, I do not care for descriptive violence in such a fashion. Besides, if they did it once, it’s likely something similar will occur later on. I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you delight in blood, which I hope you don’t. Either way, you probably shouldn’t read unless you are at least fifteen or sixteen, though I’d say not at all anyway. Something else I noted later is that this is the same author of the Maze Runner trilogy, which I read a while back. Quite similar in this sense – interesting plot, a bit too disturbing to be worth it.

 

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Young Adult Book Review - The Eye of Minds , 2.5 out of 5 based on 2 ratings


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