The Calling - James Frey

[goodreads]

Title: The Calling (Endgame #1)
Author: James Frey
Genre: Dystopian
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 477
Date read: February 2015

Twelve thousand years ago, they came. They descended from the sky amid smoke and fire, and created humanity and gave us rules to live by. They needed gold and they built our earliest civilizations to mine it for them. When they had what they needed, they left. But before they left, they told us someday they would come back, and when they did, a game would be played. A game that would determine our future.

This is Endgame.


As you can see from th rating, I wasn't terribly impressed. This book has been compared to "The Hunger Games" in several reviews, which I don't think is entirely fair. Firstly because apart from the fact that the main players may end up having to kill each other, the plots are nothing alike otherwise (which is evident just in that "may" in my previous sentence); and secondly because "The Hunger Games" is just so much better! ;)

I liked the plot well enough, and in the right hands, I would probably really have enjoyed the book, but unfortunately I didn't care for the writing style at all. For some odd reason James Frey chose not to use indentations at all, which took some getting used to, and there were 73 end notes throughout the book, all referencing some goo.gl link or the other. I tried checking out the first 3-4 of them, but they seemed to have absolutely no relevance to the plot, so I just dropped them after that. They served no purpose other than to annoy me.

Mostly the book could have done with a good editor. It was really slow moving in places, and I think I'd have liked it a lot more if it had been a complete story in itself, rather than the first book in a series.

I doubt I'll be reading the sequels. While I did like Sarah and some of the other characters, as a whole I just don't care enough.