Official Review: Continuity

[capucine]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Continuity" by C. Allen Brown.]

C. Allen Brown’s Continuity is a science fiction novela. Insofar as I comprehend it, the characters of the book fall into one of four categories - Authentics, Guardians, Suits and the Others. The book’s protagonist, Mason Fiske is a Suit with supernatural healing powers which endow Suits with souls (they are otherwise soul-less). This process, however, requires assuming part of the soul of the Guardian who created the Suit in his or her image. Authentics have souls - and there are a limited number of them, some three thousand odd; the Suits account for the remaining several billion humans on Earth. In other words, in order for Suits to become Authentics, their respective Guardians must perish in the process. The Others are, insofar as I understand it, Guardians who have gone rogue. The world of Continuity is analogous to that of the Harry Potter series – it is no different than ours; rather there is a parallel world that we, the Suits and Authentics, are not aware of.

While I was initially intrigued by the concept behind the book, this sentiment quickly disintegrated into disappointment shortly after the prologue. Continuity commences like a bad romance novel, and though it progressively becomes more readable, the book never seems to shake the moniker.

The book is further stained by its oft times feeble spelling, including, “He’s so...feable,” and “he didn’t break his gate,” while walking. While I would like to believe that such criticism is merely my own pedanticism, I do not think it is too much to ask that a book be edited or at the very least, spell-checked (not that that would have helped in the gate mix-up). In this day and age, there’s simply no excuse for simple spelling errors.

The gait of the book is rather choppy, jumping from character to character, scene to scene, with chapters of two or three pages. While this was not in and of itself perturbing, it seemed that the author's pretext for this practice was using quick cuts as a proxy for suspense. Considering the inertia inherent to Continuity was sufficient to keep a reader engaged, I found the aforesaid device to be superfluous and mildly off-putting, at least initially.

The book is not without its redeeming qualities; it tells a moderately interesting tail, I beg your pardon, tale. It does a fairly decent job of holding the reader's interest. While not my cup of tea, I can see how this book might appeal to some people, particularly people with low attention spans.

I give the book 2 out of 4 stars; while well-intentioned, the concept was not as well executed as I hoped it would be.

***
Buy "Continuity" on Amazon