BotW: The Roar

Let me be upfront with Emma Clayton's The Roar: I recommend you don't read it.

Whoa! Mr. Thomson is saying NOT to read a book?

In a word, yes.

To be perfectly honest, I found The Roar to be a book with too many problems to recommend. I am surprised it was recommended as a Lonestar finalist. Normally, I wouldn't book talk a book that I cannot recommend reading, but The Roar is a 2010 Lonestar winner, and I feel obligated to warn you that the book falls short of its peers.

So what's wrong with The Roar? The books starts off well enough, with a Pod Fighter chase sequence that could easily translate into a Hollywood action movie. But it all goes downhill from there. In the first place, Emma Clayton blatantly rips off core themes from the Star Wars franchise: boy and girl twins with a telepathic connection to each other, telekinetic powers that closely resemble The Force, and Pod Fighter spaceships and flying sequences that could have easily fit within any of the last three Star Wars movies. If Emma Clayton had thought to throw in some "laser swords," George Lucas might have had grounds to sue.

Now, imitation is the greatest form of flattery and I wouldn't normally mind if an author borrowed some ideas to write a good book. But Emma Clayton never seems to tie her borrowed ideas together in a satisfyingly coherent way. Her main character, Mika, is single-minded in his quest to find and rescue is sister, but written with no depth beyond that. In fact, almost all of the book's characters are high on melodrama and cliches, low on substance. Emma Clayton often had her characters do and say things that didn't make sense within the narrative of her own story.

The Roar, the namesake of the book, falls flat, described as a noise and din that manifests in Mika's head and is fueled by the injustices perpetuated by the book's main villain, Mal Gorman (mal in Spanish and other romance languages means bad, a not-so-subtle signal that Gorman is not a good guy). I understand the author's attempt to focus outrage and injustice into telekinetic power that Mika wields against evil, but she didn't come close to pulling it off.

The book's ending was a mess, due mostly to the fact that Emma Clayton threw a lot of themes into her book, but failed to tie them together in a way that made sense. The book's finale contains a twist, but I had already deduced it halfway in and Clayton did a poor job of explaining why the twist happened and what it meant for the characters' future. The final pages came to an abrupt halt. At first, I thought the book was missing pages.

I can't tell if Emma Clayton means to write a sequel to The Roar. The ending is so convoluted, I can't tell if it's meant to segue into a continuing story. Sequel or not, I recommend you stay away from The Roar. Even if Clayton manages to salvage a compelling story in future books, The Roar simply isn't worth the time investment.