The God Game

So this book is much like the game in the plot. Meaningless, grasping at symbols and mythology to continually throw at the reader. Much like a horoscope, it throws it all out there hoping that whoever is reading will be able to derive some meaning from the drivel.

This book has one redeeming grace. The characters are deep and the relationships between them are nuanced. While they seem to flip between saints and villains often, often with no reason why. Most of what the characters do doesn't make sense, but at least they feel and you can feel what they feel. By chapter two you already care about the main character and his dead mom.

At the end of the day, this is a high school drama with broken and interesting characters. Random things happen and the book just kinda shrugs and says “it's random ai magic lol.”

As a computer engineer, who designs the systems in phones, the internet, wifi networks, laptops, etc this book angers me. It just kind of throws out technical babble that would have taken about an hour of talking to someone like myself to fix. Like the author just Googled some code tutorial and copy and pasted it. I get that putting in real code wouldn't be interesting to read and many of the “hacks” in this book aren't physically possible. But like for example, the car hacking. It briefly mentions the can bus, which is a real thing inside most cars for the US market. Then it mentions the data that is sent to the car. The hack is real, there are jeeps where you can hack the can bus through the navigation system but they certainly weren't made in 2010, the year of the car being hacked. Regardless, the data shows an eid, which should be an oid. The value of the eid was way too high (oids are like commands and they're numbered. They usually go up to a few thousand not several hundred thousand like it does in the book).

You could honestly take out the confusing “game” and replace it with an app that has similar privacy implications and misuse. The relationships between the characters is interesting and complex enough to drive the story. Jane austen did just fine with books solely about the interlacing of characters and the events that unfolded.