Title: Otherworld
Author: Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller
Pages: 355
Publisher: Rock The Boat
Published: 2017 (Today!)
Source: Publisher (Thank you so much, Rock the Boat!)
Rating: ★★★.5
The company says Otherworld is amazing–like nothing you’ve ever seen before. They say it’s addictive–that you’ll want to stay forever. They promise Otherworld will make all your dreams come true.
Simon thought Otherworld was a game. Turns out he knew nothing. Otherworld is the next phase of reality. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted.
And it’s about to change humanity forever.
Welcome to the Otherworld. No one could have seen it coming.
I’ll start with this: this book surprised me as I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I expected. I saw it YALC back in July and it had a really interesting, shiny cover and it sounded pretty interesting. Now I thought I would like this book, but I wasn’t entirely sure about what to expect as it’s written by Jason See and Kirsten Miller. Jason Segel is an actor, I’ve only seen him in How I Met Your Mother and The Five Year Engagement, but because of this I wasn’t sure of how well written it would be. It turns out the Jason Segel has done a hell of a lot more writing than I even knew about. And just to add, the writing in this book wasn’t a disappointment at all. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.
I’ve turned a bit ‘harsh’ with starring my reviews so I was actually a little torn between 3.5 stars and 4 stars. 3 being liked and 4 being enjoyed/loved. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I definitely liked and enjoyed this one so it’s currently sat at a 3.5 stars! Mostly because whilst I did enjoy this book, at some parts I felt like I was starting to drop off with it. That may have been more a case of it’s not you, it’s me with this book, but I’ve been in an ok reading mood lately so I’m not sure!
Otherworld started off strong and was really interesting. It has such a great story line. It focuses on the main character, Simon, who got into a bit of trouble and is trying to essentially win his best friend back. There’s a huge corporation called the Company who creates this virtual reality game called Otherworld. Now something that I really liked about this story is that it is hugely relatable for the current technology that we have. Virtual reality is a thing of now and games becoming even more realistic is something that will inevitably happen in the not too distant future.
This book follows Simon on a quest through Otherworld in order to save his friendship and his best friend. Otherworld has so many different elements to it and sounds like a a game that could be played now. It’s a contemporary featuring a lot of time spent in virtual reality but it has a total different element to it. It’s not just watching someone game, there is a full quest to follow and a lot of evil working in the background which leads to the quest! Despite the fact that Simon doesn’t have many friends, there are a lot of characters in this. A lot of them do come and go
This book has themes of friendship, troubled family relationships, ‘illness’ and death. I say illness but I’m not sure how to describe it. I mean like getting hurt as in breaking a bone or something. Can you tell I’m bad at explaining things? Simon doesn’t have many friends but the friendships he does have, mostly just one in particularly, he values more than anything else. He really doesn’t get on much with his mother or father, going so far to even use some family history against his own mother at one point in the book. It’s not a big deal, it’s more that his mother is a bit of a snob and has completely reinvented herself away from her family. In fact, both Simon’s mother and father weren’t that great to me. They had no regard for Simon, he had little support from them and it’s probably a good thing that Simon was a little rebellious when it came to them.
Honestly, the only thing I had a problem with is that this book started off super strong but I felt it started to dip a bit further into it and I really just wanted things to happen a little bit sooner.
This is the first book in a series – I’m not sure if it’s a duology or has more books but there are a few questions that have come from this book that I would like answered! All in all, I would definitely recommend this, particularly if you’re looking for a contemporary read involving gaming/virtual reality and a mission.
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