Day One by Nate Kenyon

Day One by Nate Kenyon
Series: N/A
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2013

Scandal-plagued hacker journalist John Hawke is hot on the trail of the explosive story that might save his career. James Weller, the former CEO of giant technology company Eclipse, has founded a new start-up, and he’s agreed to let Hawke do a profile on him. Hawke knows something very big is in the works at Eclipse---and he wants to use the profile as a foot in the door to find out more.

After he arrives in Weller’s office in New York City, a seemingly normal day quickly turns into a nightmare as anything with an Internet connection begins to malfunction. Hawke receives a call from his frantic wife just before the phones go dead. Soon he and a small band of survivors are struggling for their very lives as they find themselves thrust into the middle of a war zone---with no obvious enemy in sight.

The bridges and tunnels have been destroyed. New York City is under attack from a deadly and brilliant enemy that can be anywhere and can occupy anything with a computer chip. Somehow Hawke must find a way back to his pregnant wife and young son. Their lives depend upon it . . . and so does the rest of the human race.

I really thought that I would like Day One. I'm a member of the tin foil hat group, so the idea wasn't really that implausible to me, and I thought that it would a great addition to the dystopian genre. I was a tad bit wrong there - unfortunately, I just didn't love this one. It was okay, it just wasn't what I was looking for.

Let's start with our main character, Hawke. I just couldn't connect with him. He was too nervous, too jumpy. I also probably had a hard time connecting with him because he's a guy. Let's just throw that out there. He just wasn't the take-charge, bad-ass guy that I would want around in this situation.

The secondary characters all fell really flat for me as well - they were just names on a page. There was a time when I couldn't even differentiate between them, but as the book wore on... they started to disappear, so it became a lot easier. They weren't any better, but there wasn't near as many.

But I have got to move on from the characters, I'm just depressing myself by talking about them. Let's move on to the storyline - an invisible enemy that can take anyone down with a computer chip. If it has an internet connection, it's on to you. It knows exactly where you're at, and what it needs to do to take you down. Probable.

But let's add this tiny SPOILER-it's just a computer. A computer that is thinking and making decisions for itself - that's the improbable part. I believe that machines are tracking you, and that people can track you using them... but machines just can't think on their own. There is no algorithm that they can be taught that will make them think on their own. There's always somebody behind the desk.-SPOILER END.

That spoiler makes it all improbable. This is where my freaked-outed-ness went downhill. Because at that point, the story just lost all of it's meaning for me. Before the reveal, I obviously assumed that it was a covert government operation or something, when it wasn't.

Another pet peeve of mine [in this book] was the overload of details. I generally like details, but there came a point when it just became too much. The flashbacks were interesting, and they added some depth to Hawke, but I feel like that was their only purpose. I never learned any information that helped with the storyline from these, so I'm assuming that it was only to add depth.

Now I ask... what is the point? Day One ends with a fairly open ending, and I'm honestly not even sure how we got there. All in all, this one just wasn't for me.