Review: REEL Rangers Adventure: Volatile Moon by Darrell T. Boyd

March 30th, 2014

REEL Rangers Adventure: Volatile Moon by Darrell T. Boyd

I had trouble reading this book. This is not to say this book is bad, I just didnt connect well with it. I got lost in a lot of terms, and while I didn't connect well, I highly suggest this book to any die hard Sci-Fi fan, especially one of color, who is tired of only seeing what's become our default "white" main character.

REEL followed the exploits of a world that has suffered from human beings not taking care of it. 

Things i loved:

It's strong in diversity. The main character Tremain "Tree" Mays is Black, and his boss is Indigenous American. One of his colleagues Luis Ramirez, was a Latino male, and the other, Sophie Lavoie, was a French-Canadian female.

I liked that all their positions were super fancy and required years of training and education. I can imagine any boy of color picking up this and loving what they see on the page.

The girl even got to save the day, which was cool, considering even when female characters are strong,  a man will still be written to save the day.

Things I didn't connect with:

I didn't like the prologue. It had a lot of info dumping and I just didnt think a book that's 40 pages needed one. It also has an epilogue. I honestly would have loved to see where those characters would have gone.

I do say that while it was strong in diversity, I would've loved if Sophie would've been a woman of color. Women and being a person of color always tend to be separate, with no intersecting. Now Chen? I would've loved to see a girl like her take charge. Women of color never get these opportunities, and while I connected with Sophie, I kept asking, would she have been any different had she been from Argentina or Brazil(I say those places because they have high populations with features like hers, just saying).

The beginning had some formatting issues. While there are few grammatical errors, there were times, especially in the prologue, when the paragraphs weren't broken up. That's not a huge deal, but it made reading it seem like a brain fart with no break.

The pacing and world building were harder for me to grasp, as I had a much harder time picturing the world.

Overall, I would read from this author again. I think the book could have stood to be longer. Maybe that would have given more room to have more descriptions.

Is it shameless to admit I dreamcasted my bae Michael B. Jordan(when he had the dreads of course) as Tree?

Michael Trevino was totally my Luis

And because I wanted Sophie to desperately be Latina, I pictured Alexis Bledel!