I Ended Up Missing Futurama

Honestly I think that for the most part I was bored by this book. I think the fact that I am a girl that has grown up reading Stephen King, none of the plot points in this book were surprising to me.

Dark Matter follows the character of Jason Dessen after he is abducted by a mysterious man in a mask and finds himself in a place that’s familiar but is altogether different than the world he is use to. Jason spends most of the book trying to find his way back to his beloved wife and son. I do wish that I’ve got a better sense of Jason I feel like Crouch did not do a good job developing him. The only thing that this book is focused on is Jason and his family. And I think the way that his wife is elevated into this book into this prize is just a bit off-putting but thank goodness Crouch redeems himself in the end with that whole storyline.

We do get an interesting side character that is Jason’s companion throughout his adventure but then disappears halfway through the book which disappointed me. I had so many questions left about this character and what their ultimate fate was.

Jason’s wife Dani unfortunately wasn’t developed as much as I needed her to be. We get glimmers of this character’s strength, her ability to see beauty, her artistic ability, but I needed more if I had gotten more I think this would have easily been a 4-star book.

I thought that the mysterious man was kind of a joke because I kind of called who this had to be and once again this person’s justifications for what they did was total crap. I kind of rolled my eyes a bunch thousand since all this book did was made me long for Futurama who did better with this same type of dilemma.

I kept waiting for this infamous twist that everybody kept talking about and it just was kind of a joke to me. Anybody that has watch Futurama would have definitely gotten there before the main character did.

I do think that though the overall plot was interesting, I wish that Crouch had pushed things a little bit more. I wanted to see more darkness in the story.

The writing was okay I think Crouch tried to explain the science behind this whole book, but I am always of the mindset that you don’t need to over explain things to readers, it just often leaves you with plot holes like I saw by the time I got to the end of this book. The flow was really off after about one third of the book and it didn’t really adjust itself until almost the very end.

The book taking place in Chicago was interesting to me and I really do wish that Crouch had use the setting a little bit better. He initially did use Chicago very well in the first couple of chapters and then it just kind of became a backdrop with nothing behind it. I could almost see this being staged in a theater somewhere and you would see a backdrop and the words with Chicago written on it to represent the city.

The ending is I think supposed to leave you with hope but all I did was leave me with more questions than answers.