Nathanial Garrod

Book Review: Game Slaves by Gard Skinner

Game Slaves CoverGard Skinners first Young Adult title, Game Slaves, blasts open with a stunning fight scene you would play through in the middle of a video game. As team leader Phoenix describes the new girl on his team, he vividly describes the world they live in.

The next hundred pages is reminiscent of dull rehashing of Sophies World, targeted at 14-year-old boys who for some reason will end up forced away from the controller stuck in their hands and into this volume.

Wreck-It-Ralph meets The Matrix after about 125 pages, when the book finally hooks and we finally get out of the video game world and start receiving answers to our questions. Finally, the characters we have spent the past hundred pages trying to invest in actually grow some depth – with the exception of Dakota, the only character who has so far had any depth, who some how manages to regress.

Skinners attempt at leveling cyberethics to a comprehensible level for teenage guys (and gals) comes off like that college course that you could not stay awake during, despite how much ice cream you ate before.

Indeed, Skinner’s grisly dystopia haunts more deeply than most in this era of hype about the dim future we have at hand if we make the wrong decision. He plots a future most likely if our society continues to be controlled by the true powers that exert their force on our daily lives.

Game Slaves by Gard Skinner (ISBN:978-0-97259-6) is available in Hardcover on January 7th, 2014 and is published by the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Book Group. Thanks to @HMHkids for sending me an ARC of this title. Check out the book on Facebook. You can also check out a preview of the first two chapters here.

2 Comments on “Book Review: Game Slaves by Gard Skinner

  1. Talli
    August 29, 2013

    Finally got to the hook, huh…125 pages in. Ouch. I had that class that was difficult to stay awake in…it was a Sci Fi Lit class. Somehow the professor made sci fi boring. It was quite fascinating, really. Fascinating in a boring way.

    Anyway, probably will not be spending my time reading this, but glad to know if I ever do what to expect (especially for the first 125 pages).

    • Nathanial
      August 29, 2013

      Once it gets going, I read it in like, two and a half hours. It was just super slow to start. Actually, ended up being one of the best-realized dystopia’s I’ve read in awhile… just super slow start. And the ARC I had has a ton of words missing in random places early on, but not as much later on.

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