Call me a geek or a nerd but I love novels that deal with the kind of things I learn at school. I love immunology and have always been fascinated with how diseases and viruses get spread. So when I see fiction novels that are about things like that, well, I just can’t resist. So I gave this one a try.
Sally Mitchell was in an accident that should have killed her. It almost did. She lay in a hospital in a comatose state. But just before the doctors were going to pull the plug, she wakes up. However, she has no memory of who she was and has to learn everything (including all motor skills) from scratch like a baby. Six years later, Sally Mitchell has still not regained any of her memories. Doctors and scientists say she owes her life to SymboGen, a company that has created a tapeworm implant that can guarantee every living person a clean bill of health; if Sally hadn’t had that implant inside of her, she would have definitely died from that accident. However, not everything is okay with the implants. Sally starts to witness people going into a sleepwalking sickness state and these “sleepwalkers” start attacking innocent people. Sally must get to the bottom of what is causing people to turn into these sleepwalkers before it’s too late for her family – and herself.
This preview sounds great, doesn’t it? Totally apocalyptic and science fiction-y. Well it wasn’t great. It was… jumpy. I felt like I was reading the most fast-paced, disjointed book in the world. Even for a science student, there was way too much science jargon in that novel and it didn’t make any sense, either way. The character was hard to understand – one minute she acted like a science fiend and then the next she acted like a child that didn’t know anything about the world. Maybe that was the point. I don’t know, it just felt very confusing to me. Some of the things that happened at the end of the novel were ones I had already guessed would happen. The abrupt change in relationship dynamics that was constantly happening made it hard to keep track of things. And the way some things just conveniently happened made the whole reading experience seem fake. If you want a good “virus” book, don’t read this one. Read something by Michael Crichton like the Andromeda Strain. Because this book was certainly not worth my time.
Happy reading ~
