The Galaxy Game
ISBN: 9781784290429
Description
For years, Rafi Delarua watched his family suffer under his father's unethical use of psionic power. Now the government has Rafi under surveillance. Hating their crude attempts to analyse his brain, he escapes to the planet Punartam, where his abilities are the norm, not the exception. Punartam is also the centre for his favourite sport, wallrunning - and thanks to his best friend, he discovers a way to train with the elite. But soon Rafi realises he's playing quite a different game.
Reviewed on 27th June 2020
I picked this book up at a discount outlet purely on the basis of the cover - I’d not heard of it nor the author before, but the blurb sounded fascinating.
Sadly I didn’t manage to get anywhere with the story. The novel opens with no sense of introduction to the universe it’s set in - throwing the reader headlong into told exposition, which felt a bit like a lecture and thus not a way that I’m good at learning things. Each chapter then repeated the same from a different character in a different setting, until the point that I gave up - unable to follow or take an interest.
I felt that I would have appreciated a softer introduction - the typical introduction to the world through a character who is learning about it for the first time, which the great worldbuilding authors do, seems to work really well for me.
So after about fifty pages, I returned the book to my shelf and moved on to find something I could better engage with and would bring me more enjoyment from reading.