Review ~ Aliens Dream (Episode one: The Hunt For Adrian's Pussy) - Patrick M. Murphy

Paperback received from the author in exchange for an honest review (fast track)

Release Date: 20th May 2013

Publisher: Self-published

Description:
A science geek falls for a beautiful cat-woman Princess from an alien planet he meets in what he thinks is a dream but his life turns chaotic when she arrives on Earth to be his mate and ignites a galaxy wide hunt to find them. Some days a nerd in love just cannot catch a break?

This story that follows the last ten days on Earth of a romantically challenged geek as he falls hopelessly in love with the Cat-woman Princess he meets in a dream. His life as a solitary recluse gets complicated when she travels five hundred light years with her friends to be with him and they end up on the run from her father, his enemies, and just about everyone on Earth. The King wants his daughter home, his enemies need her to rule the Empire, and a lot of good old boys on Earth just hanker to be the first to bag an alien. Mix that in with a U.S. military who covet the technology she has and the Earth gets incredibly small in a hurry.

My Opinion

Reading the description I thought this book sounded pretty interesting so I was eager to receive a copy in the post once I had agreed to review it. However now I have finished it I am really not sure what I have just read and am feeling very confused so please bear with me while I try and arrange my thoughts.

I must admit this book was a bit of a struggle to get through and if I had purchased it myself I'm not sure I would have made it past the first chapter. The main reason for this is the the editing - or lack of to be precise. This novel is littered with typos, grammar mistakes, missed words and a strange use of question marks for statements that couldn't be turned into a questions. However this was not the main issue I had that caused me to struggle with reading.

The main issue I had was that there is a lot of description and not enough speech. There were pages and pages of solid blocks of text without any speech to move things along so because of this I felt things moved at a slow pace. As well as this I felt a lot of the description was unnecessary as it tended to repeat things over and over, which not only led me to get distracted but it was quite frustrating as this is a long book to begin with. A lot of the time it was the description that caused me so much confusion. I'm still not sure what I read as personally I didn't think things were explained clearly enough for example:

"It was some sort of sport stadium with a large glass walled double cut off pyramid sports arena and he was a in the stands like a spectator looking down through a clear glass wall."

I still can't figure out what the author meant by that and throughout the book there were many sections with long winded, hard to picture description. I believe sometimes the best writing is putting things simply and in the most obvious way and I feel this book needs a harsh round of editing to cut out the wordy sections so it can flow better. The description made parts hard to follow and the plot structure was not clear. It just felt like there was too much going on.

Saying that though, there were a few sections I enjoyed and did have me turning pages. Most of these occurred with Bryya as there was a lot of speech. This moved the action on at a fast pace and I was able to understand it as the speech meant less confusing description. When I found this section I thought the writer had got into his flow a bit more and hoped the book would continue like it. This was not the case though and soon I was back to being confused about what was going on with only minor utterances of speech.

I felt that this book had an interesting concept and liked the idea of cat-people, dog-people etc with humans connecting with them even though they are 500 light years apart. I also liked the military side of it with the surveillance of Adrian. These were the sections easiest to follow and most enjoyable so these were the parts I wanted more of.

Overall this book has an interesting concept but the execution needs work as it did feel like I was reading a first draft. With a good edit to get rid of all the mistakes and cut the complicated, wordy and confusing description I think this book shows promise but right now it's too long (something that doesn't normally bother me) and too confusing for me.