Firestorm book review

Firestorm. I know it sounds just like those millions of other sci-fi/action books floating around out there. You know, the usual plot line; Kid discovers some terrifying secret, Kid gets chased by bad guys, Kid saves the world. And frankly, that’s exactly what it is. But there was something about this one that pushes it nearly to the top of my list (NOTHING beats Ender’s Game ; ) ).
I could tell that David Klass is some eccentric, very opinionated but open-minded guy with so many ideas popping into his head that he just had to scribble everything down as fast as he could without worrying about something like CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!!! It’s like he gave all the interesting personalities and backgrounds to the incidental characters, and the hero got this normal, almost to perfect life. One character in particular I would really like to fix. Dargon is the antagonist in Firestorm, and David Klass could have done a much better job with him. I think Dargon should have been played by the Captain of the trawler that rescues Jack (the main character), you know, his name would be the same and he would be the same character, just played by a different guy. The Captain was a really cool character who was much more interesting than Dargon. He was really calm, but in a way that kind of radiated power, he never had to raise his voice, he was the natural leader. Dargon just wasn’t a “bad” enough “bad guy”. The Captain could have been played by the first mate, who was a perfect stereotype sailor. Grouchy, short-tempered, with a tattoo and an eye-patch. First-mate could have been played by any of the other sailors on the trawler, he wasn’t a very important character.
Something I really liked about David Klass was his style of writing. He uses a lot of sentence fragments like on page 262, “One of them tries to poke its nose into the grotto. Nope. Shark to big. Grotto to small. The other decides to gnaw off overhang. Uh-oh.” He does this mostly in action scenes, which I think really promotes the dramatic effects and helps the reader picture the scene better. Something else that gave the book personal voice, was his habit of capitalizing all the letters in a word that he really wanted to have emotion behind, and not just in dialog either. There was another really interesting method he used, that I don’t really know how to explain, so I’ll give an example, page 263, “I make one final effort and throw myself in. Not enough. Shark catches me. Bites my head off. Injured. Dying. Dead. Yes, I’m dead. Death is inky black. The blackest black there is. No, wait. How can being dead be painful?..........Shark missed me! I made it! This isn’t death. This cold blackness is the inside of an undersea lava cave!” I just love how he does this, and he does it several times throughout the book. I’ve read books where the character will say something to someone, and then the author will write something like, “that is what I wanted to say, but what I really said was . . . .” But I’ve never heard of anyone who applies that method to action scenes. It was cool.
There were two things that, at first, really bugged me about the book. The first, Gisco’s betrayal. At one point the telepathic, super-intelligent canine companion of Jack’s, traps him in a barn and leaves him to be beat up by this crazy ninja girl. Later we find out that crazy ninja girl is really a “good guy” and was training him to fight back, so Gisco was really just doing his job and passing Jack along to the next guy. But I didn’t like it at first because there was absolutely NO foreshadowing to predict this “Betrayal”, but after I found out it wasn’t really a betrayal, it seemed more natural. Another on was that ALL THE WOMEN WERE GORGEOUS! I hate it when authors do that. In the end though, only two of these women were actually real, Jack’s girlfriend before he leaves on his great adventure, and this girl he met on the train. One of the others turned out to be this evil, creepy, futuristic thing that turned green and grew fangs. The other three were actually all the same woman who could change her appearance.
But the best thing about Firestorm was all of David Klass’s philosophies about life, and human nature, and evolution. The whole plot line is about how humans destroyed the environment and people from one thousand years in the future come back to the present to find Jack, who is the only one who can fix it. One of his most interesting examples of this was when he talked about the fishermen on the trawler, and how they themselves were not evil men, they were just people trying to make a living in the world, but their methods of fishing were still killing hundreds of coral reefs and causing thousands of species to go extinct. It is in human nature to destroy, or try to contain every aspect of life, and in the end, this will lead to our down fall. It’s a lot like the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” and “The Core” which talk about the end of the world being caused by pollution, people just not caring about the world around them, or trying to control the climate, the animals, or even each other. The coolest thing, and perhaps the most depressing about the story was that this could actually be Earth a thousand years from now.
Probably my favorite part of the book was when Jack was describing Firestorm, pg. 269, “It doesn’t come from outer space. Nor was it created by a wizard. It’s of us. Of the earth. It has the depth of life. The joy of our own love. The pain of our guilt. It has power. Fantastic power. Maybe even the power to save the seas and change the future. And it’s been waiting for me.” I just LOVE that!
All in all, this was a very good book, better than the usual ones. Really the only complaint I have about this one is that the ending needed to be a whole lot more dramatic. I was going to write my own alternate ending, but I ran out of time. It’s almost like David Klass combined Orson Scott Card’s amazing insight into human nature, and Anthony Horowitz’s knack for incorporating action into books with a powerful theme. I would give this book a 9 ½, I really recommend it. Thanks go to Billy for (literally) making me read it!!!