★☆☆☆☆ I acknowledge defeat

The Search for Symmetry

Brett Salter

I like books. I can read almost anything with pleasure. However, The Search for Synergy defeated me.

There are four main characters in The Search for Synergy.

Rome Lockheed and Julian Rider are two generic middle-school boys who have secret magical powers.

Mr Jones is a librarian who mentors the two boys. He's basically Mr Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (To be clear -- I am not suggesting that Salter got the idea for Mr Jones from BtVS, merely that they are similar characters.)

Mr Rider is Julian's father and is a pompous, pretentious tool. ("Tool" is a word Julian himself uses to describe his father.) He is clearly set up to be completely unlikeable.

My biggest problem with The Search for Synergy was that I felt I knew nothing about any of the characters and cared less. We never get to know them at all, not even Rome, from whose point of view the story is told. The blurb describes Julian as 'an oddball, up-and-coming knight with a case of the "try-hards"'. I read the blurb after finishing the book and was taken by surprise by that description.

Beyond the uninteresting characters, what really pained me was the dialog. Here is an example of Julian talking to his father,

“My sincerest apologies, sir. We are at no fault in this predicament. My companion and I were simply retrieving tomes that we require for a scholastic endeavor.” Rome’s jaw dropped in bewilderment as he looked at Julian. Julian continued. “My hope is that you and my matron can find in your heart of hearts to excuse my actions. Foul luck has intertwined itself into this miscalculation.”

Much of the dialog is like this: pretentious, pseudo-archaic, and semantically inaccurate. No one on Earth has ever spoken like this unironically. Mr Rider always talks this way, Julian does too, when he's talking to Mr Rider, and Mr Jones and even occasionally Rome are infected with the same virus, although less floridly. It is painful to read. Salter obviously knows that it is jaw-droppingly awful ("Rome's jaw dropped"), but perhaps it is intended to be funny.

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