ARC Review: Androne

I read Androne by Dwain Worrel as an ARC but not really an ARC. It was a copy sent to me by the publisher, but it is not advanced (as in it is not not-yet-published). It came out on September 1st. So almost. The second book of the series, Alliance, is expected in 2024.

I enjoyed this book. It was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages, sometimes after I should have been asleep, even though it isn’t the sort of thing I would normally get into. The plot is full of twists. You’re in the protagonist’s head. There’s always, always a question about what is going on and what is going to happen next. Some people will be able to figure things out long before they probably should, but there is still plenty of tension about how things are going to go down and the stakes are really high for multiple characters. What I would call this book: an action movie in book form. In my memory, it’s almost like I watched a movie.

In the not-so-distant future, there is one moment in time when a full third (or is it more? I forget) of the worlds’ military is destroyed. And no one can figure out who did it and why. All countries are damaged. It’s not AI. It’s not aliens. No one knows! And people enter a new reality where questions about violence and instability live just under the surface of their questions in the communal psyche. Paxton is in the military and comes from a military family. He sustained losses in the attack and has been called back to serve with a bipedal drone program, the only way that humans are going near the vast tracts of earth that have been destroyed by the attack. Paxton leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend he’s not really sure how he feels about and immediately falls in with a few characters, some alluring and some trouble—though which ones are which? With a godfather in power, Paxton decides he wants to use his expected child as motivation to move up in the ranks, but the questions he asks cause him to stumble over some truths he might not be ready to handle.

I’m not going to sell you on this book being great literature, and yet I started out impressed with the writing quality, especially for the type of book that it is (which is sci-fi action thriller). The writing is, at times, beautiful, descriptive, and interesting and yet it tells an actual story with the normal arc. (There is some suspense at the end—leading us to the next book, I presume.) And while this is all still true, I started to notice things that made me feel like Worrell might be trying too hard, like the phrase “illiterate infrastructure.” Uh, what? (That’s just a random example.) And he’s really, really big on reusing five-dollar words, often on the same page, which is a pet peeve of mine. (I’m not saying I don’t inadvertently do it, but still a pet peeve.) And then, somewhere along the line, I noticed he was also breaking some conventional grammar rules, most notably serial commas. And now I am going to go off on a tangent for a sec, on something that you might not even notice if you read the book:

I can understand the mood that would make a modern person think they would want to omit serial commas and otherwise buck traditional grammar rules. But, um… it doesn’t work. Take for example the first sentence of the second chapter: “Round mustardy hills and yellow dried shrubs colored the I-45 vista.” Since there were no serial commas to tip my mind effortlessly into the image, I tried to read it as ‘round, like around. Then when I got to the verb, I was like Wait, that doesn’t make sense and tried to turn that into another adjective (because “colored” can go either way), and soon I was lost and having to go back and re-read the sentence, trying to parse it out. If the sentence had used proper grammar and read, “Round, mustardy hills and yellow, dried shrubs colored the I-45 vista,” there would have been no problem, no distraction. I would have slipped right over it with those withered plants and canary hills stretching to my imagination’s horizon. The thing about breaking grammar rules is that confusion can ensue because the words suddenly make no sense or they say something else, the something else being what I encountered in this particular case. I was going around a Seussian hill and hit “colored” like a smack to the face when a couple of serial commas would have avoided the whole thing.

And back to where I left off in the actual review. The book is definitely a movie-like book that will appeal to a particular reader. However, I have discovered from reading other reviews that if you are military, you might find the book’s setting silly as heck (meaning it is a very unrigorous environment that lacks accountability). But if you just watch and enjoy military movies… you might be fine with the setup, not even notice. It wasn’t something that was too hard for me to suspend my belief about. For me, it was harder to accept Paxton’s motivations. They felt forced, though this is partly because I can see the same selling-issue in my own current character’s motivations. So maybe I’m being sensitive? Funnily enough, I really enjoyed where Paxton’s rando motivations landed him in the end, which is unconventional in a wonderful way. But how he got there… How a lot of characters explain their actions… I’m not the only one not feeling the flow, the believability. Also, I did figure out the big twist before page 18, but it turns out that there are more twists to wait for. Either way, I would recommend not reading spoilers or too much about this book before starting.

If you are interested in the genre, in sci-fi action movies, or in easy-to-read, fast-paced novels with twists and turns and a military feel, then by all means grab a copy of this book and then maybe the next one in the series. I’m wondering if my son, who loves mechs, would like this (even though drones are not mechs, they are kinda close). Also, my husband might like it because of a reason that I can’t share because it would be a spoiler. At any rate, if you are willing to just go with it and forgive some motivations and details and causes just like you would watching a sci-fi action thriller Blockbuster movie, then this is an otherwise well-written book that will for sure keep you turning the pages.

“Amid the diaper changes and bottle feeds, something sinister had occurred, a sapping of one generation by the other, and Paxton felt it too now, that slight snag at the seam of his youth” (p13).

“He evaporated to body odor—like a vapor, like an out-of-body drift…” (p38).