Book Review – Armada by Ernest Cline

Goodreads Synopsis:

It’s just another day of high school for Zack Lightman. He’s daydreaming through another boring math class, with just one more month to go until graduation and freedom—if he can make it that long without getting suspended again.

Then he glances out his classroom window and spots the flying saucer.

At first, Zack thinks he’s going crazy.

A minute later, he’s sure of it. Because the UFO he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.

But what Zack’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it.

Yet even as he and his new comrades scramble to prepare for the alien onslaught, Zack can’t help thinking of all the science-fiction books, TV shows, and movies he grew up reading and watching, and wonder: Doesn’t something about this scenario seem a little too… familiar? 

Armada is at once a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming of age adventure, and an alien-invasion tale like nothing you’ve ever read before—one whose every page is infused with author Ernest Cline’s trademark pop-culture savvy.

Review:

So, I loved Ready Player One and had high hopes for this, but when it came out it was getting quite a lot of negative reviews and so I just kinda forgot about it until now. My copy is a rather large hardback and was taking up too much space on my TBR shelf so figured may as well read it now!

The book wasn’t that bad. I can definitely understand a lot of the negative reviews and for me it definitely just didn’t feel right and fell flat a lot of the time with the references. It really does feel like he was trying to much to emulate what made Ready Player One so great and well, that never goes that well.

The plot wasn’t that bad, I actually rather enjoyed it if not for the fact that I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the characters as I feel they just weren’t that developed. The worst part for me was Zack’s “relationship”. We see all his interactions with this girl and honestly even with the world potentially ending, it was just not realistic at all and read a lot like just fulfilling a fantasy of “getting the hot girl who is good at video games”.

Ultimately, I think this book really suffers due to the fact that it’s always going to be compared to Ready Player One which does the same thing as this book, but better and since this book doesn’t have anything outstanding to draw you in, there’s really not that much in it to recommend it to readers other than those that just want to read more of the authors work and enjoy spotting as many references as they can (I must admit, I certainly got more in this one than in Ready Player One as my knowledge of movies is incredibly bad)

Overall, this is not a bad book but it’s not one I’d recommend. I’d instead always recommend Ready Player One and say only read this if you really, really want to read more by the same author as I don’t feel I’d have missed much by not reading it but since I already owned it, I figured may as well give it a go.

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