Rainy Day's Books, Video Games and Other Writings

Rating: 1 star

In one terrifying event called the Ninety-Nine, all major military installations on earth were eviscerated. But by whom? Foreign powers, AIs, ETs? Every conceivable adversary was ruled out. Reeling from massive casualties and amid hundreds of conspiracy theories, humanity creates Andrones: bipedal android drones piloted remotely by soldiers who will never again need to be on the field of battle. Newly minted Androne pilot Sergeant Paxton Arés has now been deployed into a fight against an enemy no one understands or has ever seen.

Passing mostly uneventful days patrolling an unidentified desert, Paxton spends time communicating with his pregnant girlfriend back home and reflecting on his impending fatherhood. But as he is drawn deeper into military camaraderie and begins quickly rising up the ranks on the strength of his father’s military legacy, Paxton starts to question the swirling rumors about the nature of the conflict. What he’s encountered in the shifting dunes—something inexplicable, indomitable—fills him with the fear that whatever is out there is destined to win.

Whether it’s curiosity, ambition, or a newfound paternal instinct, Paxton has a driving need to understand the dangerous truths of this strange, invisible war. And the choices he must make have the power to change everything.

So to be honest here, Androne is a read I wasn’t able to finish. I’d gotten about one-hundred pages away from completing it when I decided I could no longer trek through this book. Since I hadn’t finished it, I was unsure whether I should review it or not. But I figured why not talk about this book so I can explain why I couldn’t complete it?

So to start off, what caught my attention about this book and made me want to read it to begin with was the description of the plot. You have a story that takes place after a huge event called the Ninety-Nine that affected everyone around the world. You also have the military who has soldiers trained to pilot andrones whose mission is to go out and find out who caused this major event to take place. Basically, the premise of this book sounded interesting enough to me to want to give it a read. I loved the idea of military personnel no longer having to go out in the field but using andrones in battle. It was a science fiction scenario that sounded promising to me and that I felt like would hold a lot of amazing possibilities.

And it started off intriguing enough for me to continue reading to see what would happen next. But as I continued reading Androne, I found myself starting to lose interest in what I was reading. It didn’t help that the main character of the story Paxton is one of the most boring characters I’ve encountered in science fiction but also didn’t particularly care for any of the other characters in this book either. I feel like as a reader, this made this book even harder for me to read because I didn’t care for anyone in the story, so I felt like I was just continuing to read this book for the plot.

But there were issues with the plot in this book too. In particular, when as a reader you do find out the truth behind the cause of the Ninety-Nine, it doesn’t make any sense. At all. If anything, it’s the leading cause of the issues this book had for me that resulted in me deciding not to finish it. Because Paxton gets told by one of his superiors who the enemy is here. He doesn’t pilot his androne and discover the truth on his own or do anything at all that warrants him finding out the truth on his own. Nope, someone he works with knows who they’re fighting and decides to tell him even though she doesn’t have the authority to do so. There’s also no real explanation given either as to how they discovered who the enemy is or anything. And somehow Paxton is involved in it too besides being told the truth and that doesn’t get explained here either. This all annoyed me and made this book difficult for me to continue with because I felt like there needed to be an explanation for what was going on instead of the story progressing the way it did.

I had such a difficult time reading this book that every time I was looking to read, I was contemplating back and forth between whether I wanted to continue reading this or not. Until I decided I gave as much time trying to read this book that I could give and want to read something else instead that won’t make me feel the way this book did anytime I wanted to pick it back up. Overall, Androne sounded like an interesting book to me, but I just got to a point where I couldn’t continue with it anymore as I’ve gotten to the point with it where I just don’t care anymore what happens.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any books recently that you haven’t finished that you’d like to talk about as I’m curious to see what books others have read that they couldn’t complete.