Dangerous

Dangerous by Shannon Hale

....I'm almost positive that I've never read another book by Shannon Hale, and after this read, I'm pretty certain that I do not want to take on such an endeavor.

Disclaimer: I did read the advanced reader's copy of this book. This book will be released on March 4, 2014...tomorrow as I write this review. There will undoubtedly be minor changes between the advanced readers copy and the published version such as cleaning up spelling errors, grammar, etc.

An amazon summary, "How far would you go to save the world?

When Maisie Danger Brown nabbed a spot at a NASA-like summer boot camp, she never expected to uncover a conspiracy that would change her life forever.

And she definitely didn't plan to fall in love.

But now there's no going back—Maisie's the only thing standing between the Earth and annihilation. She must become the hero the world needs. The only problem is: how does a regular girl from Salt Lake City do that, exactly? It's not as though there's a handbook for this sort of thing. It's up to Maisie to come up with a plan—and find the courage to carry it out—before she loses her heart . . . and her life.

Equal parts romance and action-adventure, this explosive story is sure to leave both longtime Shannon Hale fans and avid science fiction readers completely breathless." AMAZON LINK OF JUSTICE

First, the character of Maisie Danger Brown was well set up until the point where she suddenly found a 'real boy' (Wilder) and got very gooey eyed over him.

I'm getting a bit annoyed with how many strong female characters become weak and docile when suddenly corrupted by uncontrollable love (crushes/infatuation, etc).

It's making me terse with all the love triangles that bound everywhere. The premise of the book is all LOOK, YOU NEED TO SAVE THE WORLD.

Female main character is like I TOTALLY GOT THIS .....oooo a boy.....JK I NEED TO PONDER MY EMOTIONS FOR THIS ONE BOY, MAYBE TWO BEFORE ANY WORLD SAVING CAN HAPPEN. LOLOLOLOL

.... -_- I am not amused.

ANYWAYS.

One aspect of Maisie I really liked was that she is missing her hand. It's how she was born and it's something that is made to seem normal in the book. That was pretty damn cool.

So, Maisie wins a trip to a NASA-like summer camp off a cereal box that she had to fill out an extensive survey for. She wins, goes to camp, gets paired up with a few other kids and starts to learn more about being an astronaut while going through different training simulations.

At the end of their training, the crazy doctor Howell takes them up to space on her space needle to an asteroid trapped in Earth's orbit that is being harvested for resources. While there, the kids are introduced to these weird ooze things that turn out to be tokens.

Tokens full of nanites that give them dramatic abilities.

The book runs towards an interesting, but not very well executed plot. I felt a lot of the writing was just pushing through the actions, like acknowledging a few scenes needed to happen to get the book to somewhere, but it didn't go forth very well. Like a baby trying to figure out how to crawl.

I did enjoy a few characters of the book, but I think if it had tried to less, it would have been much more effective.

I didn't care for the ending either.

However, I do recall enjoying the reading of the book until I sat back and realized that the big questions were answered by one sentence replies (it seemed like) and nothing really came full circle; it just took a leap of logic in the hopes it'd hit a plot point.

The premise was exciting, the characters were pretty cool until their emotions got in the way, but the execution of how it all came together was severely lacking for me.

...

If the love aspect had been taken out, I think it would have been a far better read because there were so many other relationships to drive the book. So many.

...

Happy reading!