Matt McAvoy Book Review

Pure sci-fi from Sherri, and it’s pretty much a crowd pleaser.  Thankfully, for a futuristic sci-fi offering, this has a standalone storyline which resolves without loose ends or cliffhangers – a passionate pet hate of mine, I must admit, and the reason I am often sceptical to read the genre; but on this occasion the book was satisfying and complete.

The premise is a pretty decent and grand-palette one, about a string-theory expert who accidentally bridges the dividing space between parallel dimensions, causing catastrophic consequences for the world.  If I’m being completely honest, the techy storyline went a little over my head, the author clearly much better informed on the subject than I am.  Whilst I understood generally what was going on, the nuts and bolts of string theory and the implications of time-space disruption, etc., was not something which I really found too easy to follow, though admittedly this may be more a matter of personal taste, and I wasn’t profoundly invested.  The jumpy timeline may have confused this a touch, and the narrative, it has to be said, was largely imparted by character dialogue, which was sometimes conveniently detailed, particularly when sharing elements of the backstory, or introducing characters in context, etc.  There was also a fair amount of relationship and family melodrama, which I thought might feature more heavily in the unfolding story arc, but proved rather to be incidental at times.  That said, this was a well-balanced offering by Sherri, and a worthy addition to the long list of books in this category.  She clearly knows her stuff and is a decent writer; I’d be interested to see what she comes up with next, and knowing authors of this particular genre, I’d be very surprised if we’ve seen the last of Dr Alessi. 

One thing I did note was the author’s vision of the world some century-and-a-half from now; I felt she didn’t really go all-in with her predictions, and I wondered if she was being a little under-ambitious with the vision, particularly in regard to potential technology of the era, etc., much of which didn’t appear a great deal more spectacular than we have now.  My personal opinion is that advances in this respect will be immense, and pretty much anything imaginable seems possible and even likely.  But that’s a minor observation, and not of any real consequence; I just wondered if it needed to be set so far in the future, when Alessi’s world is pretty much one we can relate to now.

I’d say take a look if you’ve a spare couple of evenings and are a fan of the genre.  It isn’t a particularly long book, which is good, and I definitely think there’s a fanbase for it and its author.