One of these days, I’m going to blunder into a 24-hour pharmacy at 3 am wearing nothing but bathrobes, bunny slippers, and my favorite fez, stumble up to the front counter with a box of hemorrhoid cream in one hand and a wad of cash in the other, and ominously rumble the following words to a no doubt terrified retail clerk:

"We are the same, you and I."

I imagine it will go over slightly better than when the prologue’s villain, Balan, gives same line in the third part of The Seeker’s opening.

The Seekers is a science fiction tale about children who possess unusual mental talents—talents that make them either an enormous asset or a considerable liability, depending on who you ask.

Children with superpowers in a high stakes struggle against the Powers That Be is fertile ground, and The Seekers has enough interesting ideas to plant in it—but several missteps have left the field dry and barren. The narrative is far, far too expository; every other paragraph is a textbook case of "Telling, Not Showing". We’re told how characters feel—what they think—what they want—where they’ve been and where they’re going. And because the writer is carefully working to keep crucial details from us for the purpose of building suspense, a lot of this telling isn’t even that informative—so what’s left when you take the ‘info’ out of ‘infodump’? Exactly.

What the story seems to be going for—quick, precise scenes that cut at the core of a character and their motivation, keeping our interest fresh without revealing the machinations behind the curtain—requires a deft and clever hand. Instead, the scenes are dense, packed with a myriad of expository details that dance around what’s really going on—and as the story moves on, so does my patience.

It’s a hard job to keep someone reading a story when they don’t know what’s happening—you have to either make the mystery tantalizing or distract the reader with all manner of literary legerdemain. By the time I reached Chapter 3, I stopped—because I no longer cared about the answers to the questions posed by the previous chapters, and the story’s meat wasn’t enough to hold me otherwise.

This is a story in desperate need of a date with a meat-cleaver. But if you enjoy interesting ideas and don’t mind it when they’re choked under a thick syrup of indulgent prose and a liberal spraying of cliches, you could do worse.

2 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Help us improve!  Register or log in to rate this review.