Book Review: Armchair Safari, by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

This showed up as a recommendation on Amazon, and it had lots of good reviews, so I took a chance on the Kindle edition.  I saw some reviews that referred to this work as:  "an inferior implementation of Neal Stephenson's REAMDE".  I have not read REAMDE, so I can't speak to that.  But, I took a chance on it - anything that involves a virtual world sounds interesting.  My initial reaction to this book was that it would be something like Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, but the only similarity is the online game.

I have to say, I had some trouble getting into this, but I stuck with it.  The description of the book refers to the character Megan and her exploits in the multi-player online game called Armchair Safari.  Her character becomes involved in a quest to obtain a major jackpot which will free her from crushing debt.  Initially, the story jumps around between several different characters, and much of it seems unrelated to the description of the book.  At the start of the story, there is very little content about Megan.  Gradually, she becomes more involved in the story, but it is really unclear as to how everything else is related to Megan and Armchair Safari, and I have to say the book was not holding my attention for the first 50 to 100 pages, and I considered giving up.

Somewhere around the halfway point, things started to become clearer and more interesting, and then with each chapter I wanted to see where the story would end up.  There were a few surprises, and you do learn how everything is connected, so the story ended up in a good place for me.  I'm not sure why the first half was a struggle to get through, but this ended up being a rewarding read.  Was the writing style different?  Maybe.  Did it change halfway through the book?  Maybe.  Did I have difficulty because I was expecting a story like Ready Player One?  I don't know.  Is the story similar to REAMDE?  I won't know that until I get around to reading it.

There are a few things that really stood out for me.  First, there are some characters that are kind of nasty, and do some nasty things to other people - be warned.  Second, the game Armchair Safari had some really interesting elements to it, and the characters in the game had some really interesting ideas regarding protecting their fortunes in the game.  Third, there are some story elements that I totally did not see coming, which is always nice when an author can pull it off.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes stories with many complex elements which end up being woven together into a complete story - it just takes a while to get there.