So, I got this book at one of the Texas Teen Book Festivals, autographed of course, and it has been patiently been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get a chance to pick it up. When I had last talked to my son about what I should read next he told me to wait until we could read this one together. So, at the beginning of February we picked this one up and started reading it in intervals.
Jareth ended up making it 2/3 of the way through it before he moved on because it is sometime hard for him to keep interested when a book is broken up so much. We hadn't been reading it every day as we should have. When I finally asked if he was done, I did continue to tell him what was going on as I read it. He was still very interested in the story.
I was a little worried that working so slowly through it would have a negative effect on my interest in the story, but when I actually sat down and read it, I slipped right back into the story and moved quickly through it. Dashner is a great author that does a wonderful job of holding the reader's attention.
The story is one that follows a gamer named Michael, a teenager that lays down in his virtual reality bed and slips into the VR world to play games with his friends. After he sees a girl rip her own Core out (the link that separates your VR mind from your real body so that when you die in the game, you don't actually die in the real world) he is contacted by the VNS, a government organization in charge of monitoring the Virtual World. An Agent Weber asks that Michael and his two best friends make their way through the system to find Kaine, a man who is slowly hijacking people for experimentation and sometimes killing them. Michael and his hacking skills are needed. But the closer Michael and his friends get to Kaine the more crazy the world becomes until Michael is having real trouble figuring out just what exactly is going on.
Not only is Dashner such a great writer, capturing the voices of these teenage gamers wonderfully to make the reader laugh, but his plotting ability is astonishing. I am still kind of reeling from the major plot twist at the end of the book. When I explained it to my husband he was shocked. Jareth literally screamed "What!?" It was just mind-blowing.
This book was a great one. Especially for me and Jareth who loved the show Sword Art Online where the gamers were stuck in the program until one of them could beat the game. The Eye of Minds is a great story because with VR slowly easing further into everyone's lives, the events of this story could actually one day take place! It makes it a great story for young adults. I look forward to picking up the next one and seeing how Michael's story progresses.
::EDIT:: I am marking the scheduled publish date on this for Feb. 29th so it will be listed on the Feb bracket, even though I didn't finish the book until March 1st.
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