Kazuma Kamachi

This is the first book in the A Certain Scientific Accelerator (ACSA) series (there are nine books in the series right now). I picked this up on a whim in the library, it looked cool and different...like something I would really enjoy. I am sooo happy I picked this up from the library because this book was a mess.

I’d like to summarize the story for you but I am not really sure what actually happened here. Some people are powerful psychics and can do things with their minds, there’s also an evil group called the DA...at least I think they are the bad guys...I wasn’t completely sure. Then there’s a dead/unconscious girl who powers mechanical things or something.

This book was a mess. I have no idea what is supposed to be going on here. There are a lot of frames of fight scenes but they are hard to follow and it’s hard to see what’s supposed to be happening. I do know that although this is supposed to be rated teen there was a particularly disturbing scene involving a tentacle and lady parts (you see everything but the explicit lady parts). Also there is some frontal female nudity as well.

I almost stopped reading this halfway through, but since it was only going to take me 5 more minutes to finish it I did. This was soooo disappointing. It seems like this story will have some interesting dark overtones...if only I could figure out what the story was.

Overall I didn’t like this. The story and illustrations are very confusing and hard to follow. I would recommend older teen because there is some nudity and disturbing imagery here. I won’t be continuing with this series.… (mer)

I think this will be the last of this series I read, because it turns out not to be what I expected.

When I started reading, the series seemed to promise a relatively light-hearted science-and-paranormal adventure story. The protagonist's special gift, Imagine Breaker, lets him get mixed up in grand events without being particularly powerful in most respects. He's a bit hopeless and slowly collects a group of friends. The events of the first book seemed to support this idea, with no real harm done and things working out amicably.

Things have rapidly changed. The second book features a great deal of bloodshed and drama, while dispensing with the more playful elements. This volume takes things even further, abandoning both the lighter plot points and the character the whole series is named after (she gets about three paragraphs of pagetime) in favour of a dystopian conspiracy plot featuring the deliberate murder of twenty thousand slaves. There's plenty of graphic on-screen violence and the whole thing feels pointlessly brutal and grim. Unlike book two, there's no release at the end, and I didn't feel it dispelled the tension or offered a satisfying resolution to the villain's arc, nor that of the other characters.

I no longer feel like I have any idea what this series is doing, other than apparently depicting increasingly unpleasant situations full of murder. And I'm not interested in reading that.… (mer)