Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers by Russ Colchamiro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***
I agreed to act as a reviewer for this book. So, first things first – the advertisement for this book suggests that it’s imbued with the spirit of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. It isn’t.

The author appears to be targeting a demographic of males aged eighteen to twenty-five. Since I’m not in this demographic or even close, it will be difficult for me to fully evaluate the book; however, I think he succeeded in producing a story and characters that will appeal to those individuals.

The plot is fairly simple. An artifact – one containing a substance that can create or destroy universes – has gone missing. Attempting to retrieve it is a collection of aliens – beings from another dimension – one that the author labels Eternity. It has been found by a human for whom it has strong hallucinogenic properties. He decides to take a trip to Europe in the hope of finding someone who can provide insight into what he has found. So we have a race by competing aliens to track down and collect the artifact and we have a road trip. This is the first volume of a trilogy so a resolution is not to be expected and there really isn’t one.

In my opinion this book is okay – not great – not terrible – just okay. It’s the sort of book one might read while sitting in an airport waiting room or while riding transit. It’s supposed to be a comedy but throughout the 339 pages I found myself chuckling exactly four times – hardly a knee-slapper but not awful either. Of course if I was in the 18 to 25 age bracket I might have found it far more humorous.

The writing is rather inconsistent. There are parts where it flowed beautifully and others where it was disjointed and difficult to read. Overall I think it was mostly pretty good but the not-so-good parts were decidedly jarring. In addition the author had a tendency to belabor some of his points. One of the rules of fiction is ‘don’t tell, dramatize’ but there was quite a bit of telling in Finders Keepers.

If you choose to read this book be aware that the first dozen or so pages are pretty tough sledding. The text seemed disjointed, the grammar questionable and the overall effect was one of – Who is this Jason character and why do I care when I so obviously don’t? After that things improved considerably.

I’ve rated this book a three and I’m not likely to continue with volumes two and three but to be fair, I don’t believe it was intended for someone like myself and I think that if I was 20 all over again I might rate it quite a bit higher.




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