The Six by Mark Alpert

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Young Adult
Genre: Sci-fi
Content: Nothing that I can remember

 
 
To save humanity, they must give up their own.

Adam's muscular dystrophy has stolen his mobility, his friends, and in a few short years, it will take his life. Virtual reality games are Adam's only escape from his wheelchair. In his alternate world, he can defeat anyone. Running, jumping, scoring touchdowns: Adam is always the hero.

Then an artificial intelligence program, Sigma, hacks into Adam's game. Created by Adam's computer-genius father, Sigma has gone rogue, threatening Adam's life-and world domination. Their one chance to stop Sigma is using technology Adam's dad developed to digitally preserve the mind of his dying son.

Along with a select group of other terminally ill teens, Adam becomes one of the Six who have forfeited their bodies to inhabit weaponized robots. But with time running short, the Six must learn to manipulate their new mechanical forms and work together to train for epic combat...before Sigma destroys humanity.

This was pretty disappointing. My first thought was that football is not the way to pull me into a sci-fi book. I get Adam fantasizing in the virtual world. It's an escape from a body that has many limits, but I think some sort of adventure game would have been a better choice for a book like this. Also, I usually really like sci-fi that includes artificial intelligence but this Sigma just did nothing for me. He wasn't all that sinister, which is what he was supposed to be, and he certainly wasn't witty or endearing in any way. He just fell flat.

In general the characters felt pretty shallow, with motivations that didn't ring true to me. There is the juvenile delinquent, ex-gang member, who realistically would never have been chosen for this experiment. None of her actions make sense to me. She's the kind of character that should have a problem with authority figures. When this green mohawk wearing, tattooed, pierced girl said she didn't like people staring at her, I was just done with her. Then there are the two girls that decide they have crushes on Adam, after they have all been turned into machines. Um, no thanks. That didn't make any sense at all. Then there is Adam's dad who claims to love his son, but leaves a whole lot of information out initially, about this whole program when explaining it to his son. And I just don't think I can get behind the fact that he is willing to do what it takes to turn his son into a machine in the first place. But the worst offender was the weak parent that is Adam's mom. The parents I know in real life that have children with disabilities, or that have died because of them, are some of the strongest people I know, and this woman in this book was very poorly thought out, just very poorly written all around.

There is also the trope of the military using these kids for their own ends, that has been used so much already. They turn these teenagers into robots in hopes of saving the world, and then at one point they have the audacity to be surprised that their machine is acting like a stubborn, sullen teenager? 😂

Ok, sorry, I probably shouldn't make fun of the book, but that was just too much. So yeah, I had lots of issues with this book, and needless to say I will not be reading the next book in the trilogy.