Hello and welcome to my stop on the Stringers Blog Tour!~
The blurb of this one caught my attention very quickly, so when Angry Robot reached out and asked if I wanted to read it, I couldn’t help myself and held out my little gimme gimme hands.
So thank you to the author, as well as Angry Robot for the review copy!
Knowledge can get you killed. Especially if you have no idea what it means.
Ben is NOT a genius, but he can spout facts about animals and wristwatches with the best of experts. He just can’t explain how he knows any of it.
He also knows about the Chime. What it is or why it’s important he couldn’t say. But this knowledge is about to get him in a whole heap of trouble.
After he and his best friend Patton are abducted by a trash-talking, flesh-construct alien bounty hunter, Ben finds out just how much he is worth… and how dangerous he can be. Hopefully Patton and a stubborn jar of pickles will be enough to help him through. Because being able to describe the mating habits of Brazilian bark lice isn’t going to save them.
This is the story of Ben, who is a fairly normal guy living a fairly normal life. The only thing that doesn’t make Ben a normal guy is that for some reason, he has a wealth of knowledge about bugs, fish, and wristwatches in his brain with no explanation. He also knows about the Chime, but he has no idea what it is or why it’s important. He’s tried for years to find an answer, or at least someone else who has the same affliction as he does. One night on a message board, he does see a post from someone with a very similar condition, and he agrees to meet them. Little does he know that he’s about to be abducted by an alien bounty hunter and brought on a crazy adventure.
I liked Stringers. It was entertaining and fun. Ben is an easy character to root for, and I quite liked hearing about his crazy space adventure. I also thought that Aptat and Naecia were great characters who entertained me a lot in between Ben’s chapters. There is some really solid banter between the two of them, which is something I latch onto in books a lot.
There are a lot of footnotes in this book, and while they did add, among other things, an element of humor, I found, in the beginning at any rate, that there were just a *lot* of them and so I ended up skipping some of them. This is largely due to how the kindle handles footnotes. I think had I read the physical version this would have been different. I also think this would be a fantastic book in audio, because in most I’ve listened to, footnotes are just added where they are supposed to go, and it works, 99% of the time. I think it would work very well in this case too! With the right narrator, this would be an awesome audiobook. ^_^
All told, I enjoyed Stringers and I would recommend it to someone who likes unique and often humorous sci-fi. I had 4/5 stars of fun with Stringers, and I can’t wait to see what Chris Panatier writes next!~
superstardrifter 
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