Review
Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review e-copy and having me along on the blog tour!
When I read the synopsis for Version Zero I was immediately intrigued and as I hadn’t read any of Yoon’s books before but knew he was quite popular I decided it was a good place to start. I’d say this book is YA but there are mentions of death, suicide, murder, online bullying, abuse and it does have a couple of quite violent moments.
I envisaged a read with an evil corporation and some non-stop cool action.
That isn’t what I got.
I have to say, I am disappointed. I very nearly did not finish this book but I did crawl on (mostly skim reading) purely to find out how it ended and if it was worth it. The narrative follows Max and his friends (one is the girl that got away …) as they meet a tech superstar who disappeared from the limelight mysteriously and together they embark on bringing down Wren (basically facebook) as the CEO is planning on doing bad things with everyone’s data and capitalising on it…
I like Yoon’s writing style, he has a very dry humour that comes through his writing and he is clever, both of which I appreciate. I think perhaps I was not the target audience for Version Zero which is a shame. I didn’t follow the tech talk too much although I got the gist of it and I didn’t warm to any of the characters, in fact I actively disliked most of them by the end because they made choices which I just couldn’t link to their personalities. Speaking of the end, it was a lot more violent than I was expecting so that threw me a bit too.
For a 400 page novel, I think the narrative needed to be punchier. It was quite slow and overall I think it tried a bit too hard to make a point about the Internet and not really living.
Version Zero is out this week! I’m going to put it aside now and find some more of Yoon’s work to try instead!
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