Book Review / Preview: ‘Transfixion’ by J. Giambrone

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced copy of this YA Sci-Fi Thriller, so I could give it a fair review. Womp! Super excited that this was the exact genre of book that I love best! 🙂 I dove right in to “Transfixion” by J. Giambrone and couldn’t wait to get started!

The Plot: It’s nothing short of the end of the world.

Someone has weaponized the broadcast spectrum – gazing upon the transmission is enough to steal your mind.

Kaylee Colton faces a technological Armageddon when suburbia shatters into civil war. All alone, and unable to speak, Kaylee will need to fight to survive and transcend her own fears if she is to stand against these enigmatic forces of destruction.

My review:

The short: 3 Stars – Interesting plot but it fell short in a couple areas that I couldn’t shake from my mind as I plowed through. This really disappointed me, since I wanted to loooove this book and it did have me hooked for the first half.

The long: OK, let’s start with what I liked about it! (Warning: spoilers!)

I loved the actual plot of this book. I felt that it was different enough from other YA apocalyptic books but still very believable. I will agree with other reviews, that this author’s writing style is different, although I appreciated his writing style and liked how he left the reader questioning what would come next. I became engrossed in the story of Kaylee Colton – a girl gone mute when things went south – and whether she would succeed in not only surviving the apocalypse, but if she’d also be understood by others, so she could help in the cause to end the war.

However, two major things brought the story down for me – first, we never learn the age of Kaylee. At first I thought she was 8 years old or so, since the story is told through her eyes and her thoughts and actions are very immature. (At one point, two teens are kissing and sneak off to be alone together and she can’t figure out why they would do that. She also becomes besties with a 5 year old girl, so it seemed like maybe she was younger.) Then other characters treated her as if she were older, so I wondered if she were mentally challenged (I actually thought that would have been a great plot twist!) But then she gets her voice back and appears to be a normal teenager, out of the blue – which I couldn’t seem to grasp, since she’d seemed so immature in her thinking just a chapter before. The change in her attitude was just too abrupt for me to accept as real.

The other point that bothered me is that we never find out who puts up or why the the brainwashing signal comes on TV in the first place. The story is sort of resolved in the end but not really, since it’s unclear if any other town has been successful in stopping the signal, or if the war will continue on in the near future. Kaylee had some great ideas on how to help end the war, but it almost got repetitive and boring by the end, since as soon as they’d enact one of her ideas (which were always successful), even more ‘baddies’ would come out of the woodworks and she’d have to devise another plan of attack. It was like a movie that just didn’t know when to end.

Overall, good idea; interesting writing; but I lost interest in the last hundred pages and had to fight to finish. I would say, if you are a true YA Sci-Fi Thriller fan, and the idea of the plot sounds interesting, you will probably like this book.

This book goes on sale September 9, 2014 at Barnes & Noble, Createspace, Amazon and other fine online retailers. It currently has a Facebook fanpage, as well as pages on Amazon and Goodreads. 

Happy Reading, friends!

#BookReview #SneakPeak #BookPreview #SciFi #FreeBooks #YA #IndieAuthors #Fiction