ARC Review: Bluescreen (Mirador #1)

About the Book:
Title: Bluescreen (Mirador #1)
Author: Dan Wells
Pub. Date: February 16, 2016
Publisher: Balzer & Bray 
Pages: 352 
Rating: 2/5 stars

Synopsis:

Los Angeles in 2050 is a city of open doors, as long as you have the right connections. That connection is a djinni—a smart device implanted right in a person’s head. In a world where virtually everyone is online twenty-four hours a day, this connection is like oxygen—and a world like that presents plenty of opportunities for someone who knows how to manipulate it.

Marisa Carneseca is one of those people. She might spend her days in Mirador, the small, vibrant LA neighborhood where her family owns a restaurant, but she lives on the net—going to school, playing games, hanging out, or doing things of more questionable legality with her friends Sahara and Anja. And it’s Anja who first gets her hands on Bluescreen—a virtual drug that plugs right into a person’s djinni and delivers a massive, non-chemical, completely safe high. But in this city, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and Mari and her friends soon find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy that is much bigger than they ever suspected.

Review:

I've never read a book by Dan Wells before, but I have had a couple of his novels on my TBR list for awhile. So when I was given the opportunity to read this novel, I jumped at the chance. With an interesting premise and an awesome cover, I was excited to get started on this book. Unfortunately, this wasn't a winner for me. While the idea that Dan Wells had was great, there were many aspects of the story that weren't developed well enough. In all honesty, this seemed like a first draft of the story, with many needed drafts still to come. By about the halfway point in this book, I was bored out of my mind and really didn't care about any of the characters anymore. This is always a sad thing for me, and it makes getting through the rest of the book I'm reading difficult to get through.

The main problem with this story was that it was bogged down with too many details. Understandably, there needed to be detailed descriptions of the world that Dan Wells created as it is the future with a lot of different and innovative technology. However, where as some authors would be able to simplify the technological descriptions, Dan Wells used paragraphs upon paragraphs to describe this technology and it became extremely boring, extremely fast. Throughout the beginning (and even during the rest of the book), there would be pages upon pages of scenes where info was just dumped on us. I personally don't like when authors do this because it becomes tedious and feels like they were trying to make the book longer. Even with all of this description however, things were still a bit confusing.

The other big problem I had with this book was the characters. There were way too many side characters to keep track of, and not only that but they also were all the same to me. Every single side character acted and spoke the same way, had the same personality, and were not memorable in the slightest. Most of them weren't even necessary for the story, and could have been edited out. The main character herself, Marisa, wasn't terrible, but she did get on my nerves occasionally. However, I never could connect with her at anytime during the story, and she seemed a bit flat to me. 

I will admit that I ended up skipping around in this book after the halfway point because I just wanted to finish the story. And even though I skipped around, I still was able to follow the story, which showed to me that this book needed some majoring editing. Ultimately, this book just wasn't my cup of tea, but I'm still willing to check out other novels from Dan Wells. I can't say I would recommend this novel, but you might end up enjoying it much more than I did.
                                                               

Happy reading :)

~Cassie