This book does not create a full completed story in my opinion. The premise of Eris is intriguing for those interested in sci-fi/techno thrillers. However it is fair to note that the book does not accomplish well crafted world building. It lacks in descriptive context, character formation and overall coherence. The significance of the games is not explained well enough, nor are the motives for the character's actions.

It may have benefitted from a concise prologue and additional word count. The novel is too short to execute the ambitious plot. I think this could have been simplified and targeted to a younger audience. Overall, the ARC had potential to build an interesting dystopia but fell short in its descriptions/explanations for certain features.

Although a great concept for a book I found that it missed the mark. The characters aren’t fleshed out enough for the reader to care about and feel invested in, and the plot is paced incredibly slowly. Characters are introduced quickly, with new names being added even late into the book, their motivations not explained to the extent that a reader would then result in wanting to follow their stories. Wording and plot were confusing and unfortunately it didn’t grab my attention further than the first few chapters. The ending was alright but reading this book took me significantly longer than any other book of this length. I’m not sure if it was a matter of wrong book to wrong person, or rather the book was just a great concept that fell flat.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dundern Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Personally, I did not enjoy this book at all. After reading the description, I was super excited and thought I was going to LOVE this book. What the description was vs what I read felt so misaligned. Had the book been any longer it would have been a DNF.

The chapters felt disjointed and too many POV’s that truly didn’t feel relevant.
The chapters with the teenage son felt poorly written and other chapters felt SO wordy, that it felt like someone adding ‘big’ words to make themselves sound smarter.

This is a wonderful book about the power of games, the ignorance of many and the pull to do what you believe is right, no matter the costs, all wrapped up in a sci-fi bow.

The story is told from many different perspectives, from the man who makes the Greenhouse game (a global game that players play in a virtual reality way, and about trying to fix the problems of the world and helping one another,) his divorced wife, his child who becomes indoctrinated into a hacker group, and the person who is running the group and wants to bring down all the big media corporations.

It is a clever story, told interestingly from different roles of the story, though I found the language used to be a little annoying as if the author believes that using big words makes his characters (or himself) sound clever. But other than that, I enjoyed this book.

I usually enjoy these type of futuristic technology sci fi type books. Overall the story of this one was great. However, you are simply thrown into the world with no real understanding of what is happening which ultimate leads to confusion. I did enjoy the story and technology but wished the story had more intro to it to i did not feel like i was catching up the entire time.

I received a free advanced copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I found this really difficult too read and get onto am not a fan of multiple P.O.V i get a bit lost it sounded really interesting but for me was difficult too follow at times its a shame as the blurb made it sound really interesting amd like something i wouod enjoy.

Eris is set against the background of a sandbox game called Greenhouse, the common thread of a dystopian future. When it’s creator’s son is kidnapped by a terrorist group, hoping to create a more simpler, but less digital world; the secret’s of the past come to threaten a possible future.

It’s a pacy read that will be prefect for poolside next Summer. That near future seems well realised and I’d also praise a book where it is both queer and neurodiverse positive. Where I would think it needed a sharper cursor is that it seems both anti-capitalist and friendly to the concept of a digitised and unified world. The speed of the narrative will suit its audience; especially as it gets more frantic towards the end (which also seems a little too neat). The multiple POV’s of four main characters work well, but the ‘in game’ narrative feels more like an epistolary novel.

However, the target audience of geeks like myself who inherited the earth will enjoy it. It’s released by Dundurn Press on 9th June and I thank them for a preview copy.

Thankyou to Netgalley for an Arc of this book! First off, going into this book, the synopsis really intrigued me and reminded me of Ready Player One, this may have been my downfall as I kept trying to compare the two without meaning to. I really liked the complexity of the various POVs we get, but at the same time, for me, if it has anything more than 3 perspectives, I often find myself skimming certain characters perspectives. I think the idea was really cool, but for me it wasn’t visual enough and I couldn’t quite grasp the story as it felt like we jumped in halfway through the plot.

What hooked me was how the story blended the high-tech vibes of 'Black Mirror' with the gripping storytelling style of Don DeLillo. It painted a vivid picture of a world gone crazy with our addiction to all things digital, and the intense actions driven by those fears.

The book is my cup of tea because it's packed with suspense and technology, weaving a story that kept me on the edge of my seat. The tension and danger lurking in the virtual world of Greenhouse and the real-life chaos made it a thrilling read for me! Could not put it down. 5/5

This book was too disjointed and fragmented in style/story for me to really get into. Some interesting ideas and clean crisp writing in places, but felt I was getting pulled all over the place from chapter to chapter. A real struggle to finish, and I'm still unclear about what was going on a lot of the time.

Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy this book at all. This was a great premise, poorly executed. If it was any longer then I would probably have DNF’d it.

This book is a multi-person first person narrative. This should fit well with this type of book so we get all the different characters’ perspectives - hero, anti-hero, baddie, etc. Using this approach should move the story on in a dynamic way. Sadly it’s doesn’t do this. All of the voices sounded really similar to me & I don’t think I’d have known who was speaking if the name wasn’t at the top of each chapter. It also felt like you were just dropped into their story so you didn’t feel like you knew what was going on, or even if you were a man/woman, old/young etc in some cases.

One bonus is the prose was easy to read, although the chat room speak wasn’t particularly engaging for me.

All in all I found the book hard to follow & I struggled to care what was going on. By the end, one fed the other.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. I was hopeful that it could be something gripping but it just wasn’t there. It felt like the prequel to a series, where the characters & the world were set up in the original book & you were expected to have read that first to understand. Instead you were dropped into this, not knowing what’s going on & it was jarring. I hate giving one star to any book where someone has worked so hard but I’ve found it so hard to find some redeeming qualities to bump this up. I definitely wouldn’t spend my hard-earned cash on it.

Thanks to the author, publishers & NetGalley for giving me access to this ARC in return for an honest review.

I DNF'ed this book after around the first couple of eighty pages and I think it was mainly because the plot just wasn't what I expected. The blurb had me expecting to read a whole different novel and I think it was just quite misleading. The book's plot might not have been as rash if at least some context was provided towards some of the plot lines and I think that's key in making a dystopian novel.
Overall I would give this book Two stars.

I would like to thank the publisher and netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was excited to see it compared to ready player one, so I thought I would give it a try.

I think the book had good premise and early on was building some excellent steam when the book just kind of fizzled out. I think the book would have benefitted from it being longer. The author tries to blend cybercrime and vr too much and be different at the same point.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6012366979

This was the review I posted on Goodreads.

I had a really difficult time getting into this. I tried for 100 pages but just couldn't get into it. Perhaps would be a good read but the synopsis and actual book were two different things.

An interesting concept, but I’m not sure it was for me. Thank you to the writer publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to review this book.

To be totally fair to this book, I'm just going to point out that I read a lot of books like this, so it's hard not to compare this to others. Is it readable and entertaining? Definitely. At the same time there is absolutely nothing ground breaking about this. It's like reading a mystery because it's entertaining and just like all of the other mystery novels. That somehow works better with mystery novels than with sci-fi novels, though, so I'm not totally sure what to do with this. Ultimately I was left feeling unfulfilled by this. It was perfectly fine and maybe if a super light sci-fi novel mostly set in a video game universe appeals to you, go for it.

This one is so hard to rate. The premise and bits of the story I really liked! Even the writing style was even quite good but I just found it hard to get into some of the characters and some of the story felt disjointed where it jumped from one thing to the next. Probably quite good for some younger readers or people who aren’t massive sci-fi fans! Or someone just wanting to dip their toe in the pool of this genre.

The book was very intriguing to me, especially as a gamer. It did pique my interest initially but I found it hard to follow all the way through.

This book was very short and fastpaced and it would perhaps have served it better if it were longer, had establishd its world a bit more. The writing style is strong and engaging and i finished the book nearly in one setting, the beginning is strong and hooks you quickly but the ending lacks bite. I was initially wary of the female characters and prepared to give his book two stars but I was more positively than negatiely surprised. They may focus heavily on motherhood but the other male (adult) main characters also struggled with their parental roles and I was glad that family and children was more of an overarching theme than something just present for the women in the cast. All in all the book lacks the depth to truly convince me but the author can write well.

I was provided an ARC by NetGalley in exchange for an objective review of this book.

I found this book’s plot description interesting, and was excited to read it. Unfortunately, I found this book somewhat difficult to read — not because it was poorly written or because it was written at too advanced of a level, but because it fundamentally fails to provide context for its characters, setting, and overall narrative.

This lack of context for Greenhouse and the book’s characters makes the stakes in the plot difficult to understand. What is the nature of Greenhouse, and why does the game matter? The book description mentions that players in Greenhouse aim to ‘save the environment,’ but based on descriptions of the game from early in the book, which are quite violent, there’s clearly more to the game. What that is, we never learn. For one reason or another, though, characters in the book are willing to risk their lives to accomplish whatever aims they have vis-a-vis the game. Because there’s no context for the game and its meaning — to its players or the world — the characters’ obsession with the game comes across as confusing instead of serving its (I assume) intended purpose of raising the plot’s stakes and creating a sense of drama.

The characters are similarly flat. We are thrown into the perspectives of each of the key characters in the book — Don, Tony, Eris, etc. — and rather than observe each person add depth to their narrative arc throughout the book, we are simply informed of the traits of each character. The teenager is rebellious and adds gratuitous f-bombs into his dialogue; the eccentric billionaire game inventor is distant, self-absorbed, and liable to cheat on his wife. We’re thus forced to accept the characters’ idiosyncrasies early on, rather than — as ideally would be the case — learn of them as they influence the unfolding of the plot. These pieces of context — the characters’ personalities, biases, and behaviors — would be more effectively established if they were gradually revealed rather than forced upon us early in the story.

Lastly, there is the context of the book’s action itself. It is often difficult to understand whether something is occurring in the digital world or the physical world. Perhaps this is the author’s intent, but if that is the case, more context needs to be established: why is one party so hell-bent on finding another party in the digital world, when they really want to find them in the physical world? Why are players so concerned about ‘dying’ in the digital world when they can just buy another life?

The upshot is that parsing the motivations of the characters, and why their actions in the book matter, is quite difficult to do. Overall, this is a book with an interesting plot that had a lot of potential, but was unsatisfying in its execution.