Posted by I love fantasy and I love scifi, what’s better than a scifantasy? I was really intrigued by a few in our group that were said to be scifi fantasy mashups, and this was one of them. Funny enough, this is the second scifantasy that focuses around a detective MC. There’s a girl that’s gone missing and a father comes to the MC for help. MC is about to retire, he has a dead wife. Honestly, I started to lose a little interest here because although I don’t read a ton of mystery novels featuring a detective, this is a trope used frequently enough that I’ve still encountered it a bunch of times.
Well, something about this case catches Bas’s attention and he decides to look into it. Following up on the interview he goes back to the father, but now the guy says he has no daughter, his name has changed, and he doesn’t have any idea who the Bas is, it’s like this guy who came pleading for help has a whole new identity. Confused and now even more intrigued, he starts to try and uncover what happened to this girl and why her father now has no idea she exists.
The other MC is named Dee, she’s an 18 year old autistic woman and I can’t say I’ve read many perspectives from a “low functioning” non-verbal autistic character before. She’s not able to communicate in the normal way, but she can Whisper into people’s minds, a telepathy of sorts. She’s also able to remote view, looking through other peoples perspectives. She’s hidden this ability for a long time since her first foster family abused her when they found out. Her second foster family has been loving and compassionate but she’s still nervous to tell them she can communicate for fear of their reaction.
Things get kicked into gear for Dee when her ability to Whisper morphs into something scary and out of her control. Instead of being able to disconnect she was sucked into a remote viewing session — except the person she was looking at she knew, and she got a terrible feeling something awful was going to happen.
There really wasn’t much in the way of scifi here though until the end. For a long time this felt like fantasy only. There was open talk of magic and whatnot, but nothing all that techy or science based. It was based in 1991 so it’s not even given a futuristic backdrop so I was nervous to invest too much time into this one because what if we had to disqualify it after reading to the end? Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. I won’t give away what makes it scifi, but it was.
As far as the pacing I think the beginning was set up real quick, but somewhere around the 50% – 75% range it drags a little bit as I was wondering where it was going. Once the big reveal and the scifi aspect came out I was more interested and it read quickly to the end.
Ratings:
- Plot: 11/15
- Characters: 10/15
- World Building: 11/15
- Writing: 11/15
- Pacing: 10/15
- Originality 12/15
- Enjoyment: 7/10
Final Score: 72/100 or 7.2/10