The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy has a VERY intriguing prologue! This did a wonderful job of drawing me in and I was hooked for quite a while. Unfortunately, things started to go downhill for me around page 75. Even so, I did enjoy this read.


My thoughts:
This book is organized in varying perspectives, some of which we spend more time with than others. In this case, this format worked really well because it helped you to really understand what was going on. At the very beginning, I had to take notes to keep the characters straight. But after just a short time, I had them figured out.

The characters:
Hannah- a blind middle school student that gets a high tech device to help her see.

Cheryl- Hannah’s mom.

Lela- a reporter. Hannah's aunt. She is digging for a story about Undertown, Inc. but is about to get in way over her head.

Mike Juniper- runs a shelter called The Weary Traveler. He feels that his helping others is his atonement for an event that occurred in his childhood.

Cheston- rents out blade servers for users to host their sites privately. Works for Undertown, Inc.

Daniel- Lela’s intern. Computer and technology wiz.

Hemingway- Lela’s awesome dog.

I loved the plot of the book! I think this would make an incredible movie! Unfortunately, the writing style threw me off and affected my overall feeling toward this book.


Beware, the negatives:
Many of the similes were either a total stretch or didn’t make any sense at all. And there were so many of them. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few I enjoyed, but overall it was just too much. I didn’t mark any examples here because I didn’t want this element to decrease my enjoyment of the book. Unfortunately it happened so frequently that it was hard to look past.

The descriptive bits felt very over done on many occasions. There was also a quite bit of repetition and sections that seemed to ramble. Many sections dragged on and on for me, and that really bogged me down. I unfortunately found myself skimming quite a bit, especially toward the end.


My favorite passages:
There's too much noise into little solitude in the world. Everybody should shut the fuck up and get back to work.

A crow caws. She looks up to see five of them watching her, roosting on telephone wires, appearing against the gray sky like notes on an old piece of sheet music.

As much as she hates fiddling around with computers, she knows that online archives have given her words even greater permanence. They'll outlive her. That's her idea of the afterlife, immortality. She prays at an altar built from twenty-six letters.

He would earn his oxygen by helping others.

"It means there’s plenty of good in the world to offset all the ugliness. But you can’t just sit back and expect someone to take care of you. You’ve got to fight for it.”

There are only so many fights you can take on before you lose your will to make a fist.


My final thoughts:
Overall, I enjoyed this read. Unfortunately the pacing and writing style just wasn’t really for me. I found myself a bit lost at times because the explanation of things wasn’t clear, which made the story feel a bit jumpy. I gave it two stars.

I would still recommend this book to those that enjoy stories about technology and the paranormal, and for readers that don’t mind varying perspectives. And I would LOVE to see this turned into a movie!