Just completed reading “The Dangerous Days of Daniel X” written by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge and I am so angry.
What a complete waste of time. I hated it from the word go, only managed to complete it because it was a short and simple kind of novel.
Supposedly called a page-turner, the novel is about a good alien “Daniel X” who has hidden superpowers, which he uses to destroy evil aliens. He is also on a revenge mission to get the alien called “Prayer” for killing his parents, when he was a baby.
The story moves rapidly, in fact so rapidly, that it is difficult to even experience anything. For example, Daniel gets kidnapped by the aliens, is transported to another planet, meets his long-lost relatives, defeats an alien, and comes back to earth all within 50 – 60 pages. A truly amazing feat to squash so much into so few pages. Just something that I do not appreciate.
The style of writing focuses more on action, rather than conversation or emotions. And that was also not something I liked.
The quality of the language used is poor. It reads like a first draft, not a fully finished/edited novel. Very short super-basic sentences, which may be suited to an 8-year old boy (and that too one who is not very advanced). For example, the Harry Potter and the Percy Jackson books are much more complex, and include a much larger vocabulary.
After completing the book, I realized that this is the start of a series and that there are more books to come….arggghh….God help us all !
Suggestion to James Patterson: If you really need to create a series, make it all into comic books. The writing reads like that anyway.
Suggestion to others: Run faaar faaar away from this one…another planet if possible.
P.S. I give it 2 stars in my review primarily because the torture all got over so quickly.
P.P.S. I usually love science fiction, so I don’t hate this book because of the genre.
P.P.P.S. I may not have gotten so angry, if the book’s blurb clearly mentioned that it was a Young Adult novel. I felt totally misguided when I started reading the book.
