Review by jgardner15 -- Superhighway by Alex Fayman
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jgardner15
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Review by jgardner15 -- Superhighway by Alex Fayman
[Following is a volunteer review of "Superhighway" by Alex Fayman.]
4 out of 4 stars
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The following is a review for Superhighway by Alex Fayman
Superhighway by Alex Fayman is a hang-on-to-your seat thrill ride centering around Alex Fine, a young orphan with the remarkable ability to transform himself into energy and travel along internet cables. Determined to use his power for good, Alex embarks on a Robin Hood-esque quest to bring down the corrupt and evil while redistributing their ill-gotten wealth to those less fortunate and more deserving. But Alex soon discovers that his mission is far more difficult than he anticipated as he piles up powerful and furious adversaries, determined to find who robbed them of their wealth and exact revenge. As Alex struggles to cope with his new reality, and new enemies, he grows from a kid into a man, learning about love, life, and his own history along the way.
This book gets a resounding 4 stars out of 4. I have two nitpicks that could be improved upon. First, is the heavy weed and alcohol use, which I found personally distasteful. Secondly, Alex finds himself in both Amsterdam and Zurich, yet never has any language difficulties, despite not speaking Dutch or Swiss German, which I found distractingly odd. As I said, this is nitpicking, and these issues did not detract from the story in any significant manner, but something the author might want to keep an eye on in the future. Aside from that, it was well-written, well-edited, and brilliantly constructed.
Superhighway’s best feature is its characters. Told in a first-person narrative, the reader naturally gets to know the protagonist, Alex, extremely well. What really impressed me, however, was how well the other characters were developed, often in a short amount of space. Anna, the receptionist Alex begins to date in Amsterdam, is perhaps the best example. She shows up for maybe a dozen pages and three or four scenes, but the reader feels like he or she has really gotten to know Anna. The reader doesn’t just know what she looks like, but how she thinks, feels, as well as her history. As such, the reader truly gets a sense of Anna’s relationship to Alex and what she means to him, and therefore how much she means to the reader.
Most every character, certainly every important character, is similarly fleshed out. What Fayman does so well is focus, in a concise way, on the whole person: looks, thoughts, emotions, and history, and then package that into a believable character. These characters come across as real, complete individuals any reader might know. As such, it is impossible not to get emotionally invested in them, which sucks the reader into the story. In fact, I was so emotionally invested that after two particularly tragic scenes, I had to put the book down to decompress. That is the sign of a well-written story.
Alex Fine himself is one of the best characters I have read in a while. The “flawed hero” is an in-vogue motif but such a character is often conveyed as a morally ambiguous contradiction that is either hard to understand or hard to root for. Alex is certainly flawed but he is flawed in a way that makes him seem human, relatable, and easy to root for. He wants to do the right thing; he just isn’t always sure how to do it. That makes him a character the reader can easily connect to and identify with, while cheering for him the whole time.
Fayman also receives high marks for his tightly-constructed and well-designed plot. The reader knows who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what is happening at any given moment in the story, and how it relates to the overall plot as a whole. He does an excellent job of keeping the main thing the main thing, avoiding extraneous side-quests and eye-glazing exposition dumps. His pacing is excellent: he is not constantly running from scene to scene at such a breakneck pace that the reader is exhausted by the end but neither does Fayman get bogged down in scenes that drag on and while going nowhere. He knows when to floor it and when to slow down.
In summary, this is an excellent book that fans of sci-fi will immediately fall in love with. It is smart, emotional, well-paced, and excellently constructed. Fayman hit it out of the park with this one and I look forward to reading more from him in the future.
******
Superhighway
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on Smashwords
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4 out of 4 stars
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The following is a review for Superhighway by Alex Fayman
Superhighway by Alex Fayman is a hang-on-to-your seat thrill ride centering around Alex Fine, a young orphan with the remarkable ability to transform himself into energy and travel along internet cables. Determined to use his power for good, Alex embarks on a Robin Hood-esque quest to bring down the corrupt and evil while redistributing their ill-gotten wealth to those less fortunate and more deserving. But Alex soon discovers that his mission is far more difficult than he anticipated as he piles up powerful and furious adversaries, determined to find who robbed them of their wealth and exact revenge. As Alex struggles to cope with his new reality, and new enemies, he grows from a kid into a man, learning about love, life, and his own history along the way.
This book gets a resounding 4 stars out of 4. I have two nitpicks that could be improved upon. First, is the heavy weed and alcohol use, which I found personally distasteful. Secondly, Alex finds himself in both Amsterdam and Zurich, yet never has any language difficulties, despite not speaking Dutch or Swiss German, which I found distractingly odd. As I said, this is nitpicking, and these issues did not detract from the story in any significant manner, but something the author might want to keep an eye on in the future. Aside from that, it was well-written, well-edited, and brilliantly constructed.
Superhighway’s best feature is its characters. Told in a first-person narrative, the reader naturally gets to know the protagonist, Alex, extremely well. What really impressed me, however, was how well the other characters were developed, often in a short amount of space. Anna, the receptionist Alex begins to date in Amsterdam, is perhaps the best example. She shows up for maybe a dozen pages and three or four scenes, but the reader feels like he or she has really gotten to know Anna. The reader doesn’t just know what she looks like, but how she thinks, feels, as well as her history. As such, the reader truly gets a sense of Anna’s relationship to Alex and what she means to him, and therefore how much she means to the reader.
Most every character, certainly every important character, is similarly fleshed out. What Fayman does so well is focus, in a concise way, on the whole person: looks, thoughts, emotions, and history, and then package that into a believable character. These characters come across as real, complete individuals any reader might know. As such, it is impossible not to get emotionally invested in them, which sucks the reader into the story. In fact, I was so emotionally invested that after two particularly tragic scenes, I had to put the book down to decompress. That is the sign of a well-written story.
Alex Fine himself is one of the best characters I have read in a while. The “flawed hero” is an in-vogue motif but such a character is often conveyed as a morally ambiguous contradiction that is either hard to understand or hard to root for. Alex is certainly flawed but he is flawed in a way that makes him seem human, relatable, and easy to root for. He wants to do the right thing; he just isn’t always sure how to do it. That makes him a character the reader can easily connect to and identify with, while cheering for him the whole time.
Fayman also receives high marks for his tightly-constructed and well-designed plot. The reader knows who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what is happening at any given moment in the story, and how it relates to the overall plot as a whole. He does an excellent job of keeping the main thing the main thing, avoiding extraneous side-quests and eye-glazing exposition dumps. His pacing is excellent: he is not constantly running from scene to scene at such a breakneck pace that the reader is exhausted by the end but neither does Fayman get bogged down in scenes that drag on and while going nowhere. He knows when to floor it and when to slow down.
In summary, this is an excellent book that fans of sci-fi will immediately fall in love with. It is smart, emotional, well-paced, and excellently constructed. Fayman hit it out of the park with this one and I look forward to reading more from him in the future.
******
Superhighway
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on Smashwords
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Latest Review: Advent Of Silver by Atilla K. Zengin
