Gosh, this was a bizarre book (and not in a good way). In it, a guy named William Ward, a man set to take over his family’s large brewery business, discovers that his family has been at the heart of some giant, secret conspiracy that spans all of history, with eight different families secretly at war and trying to get their hands on an old treasure.
The premise is okay, I guess, but, I just couldn’t get into it at all. All the character interactions are bizarrely written, and William almost seems like an alien who’s pretending to be a human a lot of the time, because he’s so weird – and that would have been a nice twist, but the way it’s written, I think he’s supposed to be an everyman sort of hero. In the early days, I found this kind of amusing (because I thought it was supposed to be funny), but as it went on, it started to really grate. The other people are a little less weird than him, but I didn’t really feel anything for any of them, which is a shame, because characters are always the biggest point of books that appeals to me.
But, anyway, once William finds out about his family’s secret history, he goes off with a bunch of people and starts an adventure within the SkyView, which is a plane that uses holograms in order to let people see outside of it and into the past… which, credit where credit’s due, is a pretty cool concept. But, to be honest, this SkyView itself is probably the biggest problem with the whole book.
Whole chapters are dedicated to them using the SkyView to help research history, and then there are pages and pages of historic events from the past 700 years. It then explains how all of that era of history has been part of the struggle between those families – which sounds clever, and I guess it is, but for me, as someone who is actually interested in history, this felt extremely boring. Endless lists of dates and names of rebellions and wars – it reminded me of the way that history classes as a kid actively made me less interested in history.
A prominent quote about this book that I see is that it is like Lord of the Rings, and I started reading it in the hopes that it would be (since I love Tolkien), but it felt nothing like that at all. I wish I could say more, but I was so bored throughout the book, that my brain has barely retained anything at all, so this review will have to be a little shorter than others.
I genuinely appreciate what the author tried to do with SkyView, and I’m sure there’s a small group of people who will absolutely adore it. Unfortunately, I am not in this small group and I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone. When it ended on a cliffhanger that lead into a sequel, I was so disappointed, because I stuck with it all the way through, and there wasn’t even a conclusion. Oh well. Props to the author for being a history expert.
Rating: 2.7/10
