Death and Friendship.
Love and Gaming.
Mind and Machine.
The Meaning of Life.
High School Graduation.
The End of the World.
That Kind of Stuff.
A group of teens discovers that the online game they’ve been playing has serious, life-impacting consequences. While this tight knit group seems on the edge of unraveling at the beginning of the book, the author skillfully interweaves the plot of his action-packed, sci-fi thriller with an exploration of the relationships of his characters. At times, they hate each other as much as they care, but when faced with life and death, games, guns, and secret military organizations, they choose truth and love.
This is rather obviously my kind of book.
I hesitate to elaborate further because I don’t want to give too much away about the plot, which, though it starts slowly, ramps up into glorious action and heartwarming love story. By the midpoint, I was gobbling up the novel and turning the pages as quickly as I could read. By the end, I had tears in my eyes. Unreleased, but still tears.
Normally, I would quote some of my favourite lines when reviewing a good book, but in this case I feel the reader needs to discover this world as the author has presented it, beginning to end, and not in bite-sized pieces. With that said, I will at least hint at my absolute favourite line, which is the accumulation of a running motif. This motif is almost painstakingly set up by the author as a way to describe the feelings of his main character, who also happens to be the author himself. Yes, this is written as semi-autobiographical.
Crazy stuff happens. It can’t all possibly be true. You’ll have to read it to figure it out.
I’m going to read We Can Be Heroes again. And I very rarely reread. I give it a solid 4.5 stars. You can currently find the ebook at Amazon (click the book cover picture above). The paperback version would also soon be available.
*Disclosure note: I know Scott Fitzgerald Gray. He edits my writing. I should therefore be harder on him than other storytellers, just to get back at him for tearing my words apart. So perhaps I am. Perhaps I should have given We Can Be Heroes five stars. Man, sometimes I can be a meanie.
