The Restoration Game by Ken Macleod: Review by AimeeKay

There is no such place as Krassnia. Lucy Stone should know—she was born there. In that tiny, troubled region of the former Soviet Union, revolution is brewing. Its organizers need a safe place to meet, and where better than the virtual spaces of an online game? Lucy, who works for a start-up games company in Edinburgh, has a project that almost seems made for the job: a game inspired by The Krassniad, an epic folk tale concocted by Lucy’s mother, Amanda, who studied there in the 1980s. Lucy knows Amanda is a spook. She knows her great-grandmother Eugenie also visited the country in the ’30s, and met the man who originally collected Krassnian folklore and who perished in Stalin’s terror. As Lucy digs up details about her birthplace to slot into the game, she finds the open secrets of her family’s past, the darker secrets of Krassnia’s past—and hints about the crucial role she is destined to play in The Restoration Game... 

Combining international intrigue with cutting-edge philosophical speculation, romance with adventure, and online gaming with real-life consequence, The Restoration Game delivers as science fiction and as a sharp take on our present world from the viewpoint of a complex, engaging heroine who has to fight her way through a maze of political and family manipulation to take control of her own life.

So I really didn't enjoy this one. You've got intrigue, suspense, some science fiction/fantasy thrown in, but I really think it could have been better than what it turned out to be.

There was just too much.

Too many flashbacks. The main character was constantly going back to explain to how she got to the present situation, which isn't necessarily bad, but the whole story from the main characters point of view started out as a flashback to explain how she ended up where she was at the airport. I understand some of the flashbacks are needed to further the story, but they just started to feel annoying after a while especially since she is already in the middle of a flashback. Couldn't the author just have gone straight through with some of them? Told them "as they happened"?

Too much information, I mean really I like a good back story on my characters as the next person, but some of it was just a little overboard. Especially when the author is revealing information about Lucy's "fathers". I just felt like I was wading through molasses trying to read it. I didn't want to gloss over it, I was afraid I might miss an important detail, but at the same time it just got to the point where I really wished I could have.

And the things that really could have been intriguing. The "real" world. The scenes that dealt with them were cut agonizingly short. Hardly any details, nothing. Told in second person they had no real details of the "real" world. I really would have enjoyed more background on that then on some of the other characters.

I liked the idea behind the story. Maybe if it had been written differently I would have enjoyed it more.

Til Next Time,

AimeeKay