3/18/2013- Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter

I finally came across a book that's easy to summarize, which feels like quite an achievement. Gamers, by Thomas K. Carpenter, which I downloaded for free from Amazon.com, is a sci-fi YA novel and the first book in a series. It's about Gabby, an improbably brilliant young hacker who lives in a futuristic world in which life has been turned into a video game. Though she primarily uses her hacking skills to help her friends, rather than for selfish reasons, she becomes concerned upon discovering that the LGIE, a governing organization that keeps track of the game, has been digging around in her personal files. When Gabby decides to investigate this for herself, she discovers, ever so shockingly, that her lovely, idyllic life may not be all that it seems.

Snarkiness aside, I thought that Gamers was a fairly entertaining book. It's nothing that I'd go crazy recommending to people, but it wasn't a chore to read by any means. The characters were likable, the world that they lived in was well thought out and littered with references to old-school gaming, and the story was suspenseful enough that it was easy to keep picking up for a few minutes of reading. I did, however, think that it had a few major issues.

My first problem with Gamers, and probably my biggest one, is that I'd feel charitable saying that it was a bit derivative. I don't want my finger pointing to be too specific, but the last chunk of the novel is about a high stakes competition where the students at Gabby's school are forced to compete in a ruthless game, where the losers may be killed and the winners are given grand rewards. This game is created by a ruthless agent of the aforementioned LGIE, it forces, at several points, the students to fight one another, and the stealthy, antisocial girl is named after an animal. No mass audiences sit and watch the Final Raid, as it's called, but it makes parallels between Gamers and certain other series easy to draw.

I had a couple of smaller problems with Gamers, but neither of them were nearly as distracting. One of them was that there were a few errors with grammar and verb tense, but, for me,  those were only momentary issues. I also hated the cliffhanger of an ending, since, in the interest of getting people to continue with the series, it left absolutely nothing resolved. It's possible to end some aspects of a story while still keeping readers interested in the characters, but Gamers actively created new plot points in the last few pages of the book. It wasn't horrible, really, but it was frustrating.

Even though I may not seem to have the nicest things to say about Gamers, I did sort of like it. It wasn't boring, I didn't hate the characters, and, even though the vast majority of characters that lived there were doomed, the novel's world seemed fairly cool as far as dystopian societies go. If you're looking for a few hours worth of fluffy reading material that's appropriately perilous to the cast, you could certainly do worse than to read Gamers.