- Infinity Lost (2015)
- Infinity Rises (2016)
- Infinity Reborn (2016)
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have an unfortunate addiction to getting free/very cheap Kindle books even though I know – know! – that most of them are terrible. Recently, I took the time to actually sort through the gajillion Kindle titles I own and get them into some semblance of order so I can start actually reading them. Because I have OCD about reading books in order if they are part of a series, it’s been important to me to find out of if books I own are actually part of something bigger or not.
Anyway, I have a complicated rotation schedule that I use to decide which books to read next, and Kindle books are now part of the rotation, reading through them oldest to newest. Infinity Lost was an early Kindle purchase, and since I have owned it since October 2015, I thought it was time to finally give it a read!
These were weird books in that they were a bit hard to categorize. They were kind of pre-dystopian in a way – a story of someone trying to prevent the worldwide catastrophe from happening. It’s not too far into the future, but technology is doing so much more for humanity. Many of the advances have been made by a specific company owned by a guy named Richard Blackstone. The series is about his daughter, Infinity aka Finn.
The story starts when Finn is 17 and away at school. She’s started having these really weird dreams where she dreams about something that happened in her childhood, except in the dream, it’s completely different than what she remembers happening in real life. The dream version is usually much stranger and more violent than the reality version. Except now Finn is starting to wonder which of the versions is actually reality…
Finn’s best friend and roommate is Bit, a computer genius. When the announcement is made that a field trip has been scheduled for the remote and rarely-visited Blackstone Technologies HQ, Finn has a sneaking suspicion that Bit may have had something to do with it. No one else at school knows who Finn’s father is, because she is there under a different name for security reasons. Finn has never met her famous father and was raised on a fancy estate by servants and a military commander named Jonah.
At first, the field trip is awe-inspiring and exciting. But things quickly go south when the technology is hijacked by a rogue force that seems intent on killing Finn – and doesn’t care who else is in the way.
This was a really engaging story, and I was definitely hooked in while reading the first book. I wanted to find out about all of Finn’s mysteries, including this strange alternate ego who seems to be lurking within her. Although this book had a few spots of violence that was more gruesome than my usual fare, I was willing to skim over those bits to get to the story. The first book was a 3.5* read and left me intrigued to read the next story.
Full disclosure is that the next two books were around $4 each, and even though I was interested in Finn’s life, I’m not sure I was $8 interested, which may say something about my true level of engagement with the story. However, they were also available on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to embrace another free month’s subscription and read them that way.
I was very glad I had not paid $4 for the second book, as I don’t see myself ever rereading it. It definitely suffered from second book syndrome. A lot of what was happening definitely felt like filler. There was tons of violence – people don’t just die, they’re shredded or liquefied or get their faces melted or are torn apart, all in full detail. I skipped loads of paragraphs. The actual story part wasn’t bad, but it was confusing, because for some reason Harrison decided to have the book start with Finn getting dragged into a bunker almost dead, and then tell what led up to that through a bunch of weird flashbacks, which also involved some other flashbacks, interspersed with conversations of the people trying to bring Finn back around in the present (?). The timeline was very confusing and disorienting. I think Harrison was trying to emphasize the differences between Finn and the anti-Finn, Infinity, but it was overly complicated.
Infinity Reborn was a bit better. Now that we finally had most of the backstory filled in, the narrative actually proceeded in a somewhat orderly manner. There was still too much violence for my taste, but by this time I was completely committed to finding out how everything wrapped up.
While the ending was satisfying for the most part, I still did have some unanswered questions, and I definitely felt like the future was still in jeopardy. The biggest threat had been removed, yes, but there were still a lot of ??!?! situations floating around. Like what’s happening with all the Blackstone tech, and why Zero’s identity had been kept a secret and is he still a real person underneath all of that, and why Finn’s dual personality situation was just magically fine now, and what’s going to happen with the technology that made Finn who she was, and whether or not the Infinity project is still considered military property, and a lot of other things. The big issues were concluded, but a lot of the smaller questions were just kind of swept under the rug with a “everyone lived happily ever after” kind of conclusion.
All in all, I did enjoy these books as a one-time read and would give the trilogy a 3.5* rating overall. However, they aren’t books I see myself rereading at any point in the future, and they didn’t make me desperate to search out more of Harrison’s writing, either.
Infinity Lost is Book #7 for #20BooksofSummer (#6 is A Wrinkle in Time, which I have read but won’t review until I read a few more L’Engle books and review them together). The current list can be found here.
The Aroma of Books 