Invasion by Mercedes Lackey



I wish I hadn’t discovered before reading this book that it was based on a podcast, or that that podcast was based on a game. I haven’t had good experiences with books based on games. The Assassins Creed games are fantastic, the books are painfully awful. Please, steer well clear from them of you can. Because I knew this story had been told as a podcast I heard it in my head being read by overly dramatic voice actors. It took me a long while to forget that and let the characters own voices come out. Once I did I started enjoying the book.

The first few chapters are just an introduction to the characters and are quite slow. The chapter headings are counting us down to something and I guess the title of the book makes it pretty obvious what that is. When the invasion hits is when this book hits its stride. Things get interesting and we get to see what these meta-humans are really made of. Metaphorically, not literally. Literally they are made of the same things we are (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxZ2ibDWipw">we’re all guts and stuff, and bile ducts, and pancreatic juice….yeah!</a>). 

Once the invasion started I was won over. I was disappointed when a chapter ended because I wanted to stay with that character and find out what happened, but then I was happy because I got to pick up where we left off with one of the other characters. I especially enjoyed Ramona’s chapters. It was good to get a non-meta view point. There was one character that was always written in the first person, while all the rest were third person. This struck me as a little bit odd and felt a little jarring and distracting each time we picked up one of their chapters.

It was over too quickly and there’s so many unanswered questions that I’ll definitely be back for book two. I’ll probably even check out the podcast and the game just for curiosity’s sake. I’m not sure about bringing Tesla into the story, though. I hope that develops in to a worthwhile plotline and it’s not just cashing in on current pop culture trends.

On a final note, I’m always kind of curious as to how it works when there are multiple authors listed. There’s a whole bunch of people credited as authors for this book besides Mercedes Lackey. How do you write a book with more than one person? Do they write one character each? A chapter each? Does one person write a first draft, another then develops a second draft from that, and so on? Do they all brainstorm the ideas and then just one person writes the thing? My view of writing only allows for one person to be the ‘author’, other people are just editors or help with the ideas and concepts in the book, but that’s not the same as writing it. I always find difficult to get my head around there being more than one author for a book.

4 out of 5 Echo OpFours.

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