Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review
Title:
Weavers
Who wrote it:
Michigan resident and author, Aric Davis
Plot in a Box:
People with telekinetic powers find some other people with telekinetic powers.
Invent a new title for this book:
Insert the 'Plot in a Box' answer in italics and I think that about nails it.
Read this if you like:
I could see this possibly appealing to fans of James Patterson or Dean Koontz.
Meet the book's lead(s):
There are a number of leads, but much of the focus falls on nine-year-old Cynthia Robinson.
Said lead(s) would be portrayed in a movie by:
Dakota Fanning about a decade ago.
Setting: Would you want to live there?
A potent sense of atmosphere isn't really present in Weavers. Maybe I'd want to live in any of the multiple towns/cities discussed? If I was bored? Even the shady government agency is described as looking like an old middle school.
What was your favorite sentence?
Sure, maybe she could turn her experience into a career spent ghost hunting or looking for cryptids in the Pacific Northwest, but neither of those fit the bill.
I don't know why neither of those things would fit the bill. I hear that cryptid hunting is actually very lucrative.
The Verdict:
Weavers follows a group of telekinetics—known as “TKs” throughout most of the book—who have the power to read and influence other’s thoughts. It loosely focuses on a young girl named Cynthia whose psychic abilities manifest after her parents divorce. Pursuit by a government agency and a host of corrupt individuals ensues.
Information about the TKs is dumped clumsily onto the reader, trotted out in thought monologues or even through weird dioramas. There’s a scene where one of the characters is walking through a hall of history’s “great” TKs (including Jesus), as if to cram as much backstory into one page as possible. The characters aren’t very distinguished and seem even less so because of the constant perspective hopping at the beginning of the book. Just when a shard of personality starts to glimmer through, someone new takes the reins. And did I mention the acronyms? To create a bona fide shady government agency with a clandestine agenda, all you need to do is sprinkle in a few acronyms.
Sometimes a little bit of campiness is okay in a book. You don't take it too seriously, but you have a good time. Unfortunately, that's not often the case here, and I found the pages very slow to turn. The real cardinal sin that Weavers commits is that it’s boring. Davis never really reaches for anything beyond the basic points of plot and character and a handful of overused tropes. Writers who fly for the moon and don’t quite reach it deserve a lot of respect. They have ambitious ideas that don’t always find their way intact onto the page, but you can glimpse the scope of what could be. That’s how artists of any medium improve; by pushing themselves outside of their comfort range. There are few moments of interest here that might have been explored further, but for the most part Weavers sat stubbornly in the middle of that range.
About the author
Leah Dearborn is a Boston-based writer with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in international relations from UMass Boston. She started writing for LitReactor in 2013 while paying her way through journalism school and hopping between bookstore jobs (R.I.P. Borders). In the years since, she’s written articles about everything from colonial poisoning plots to city council plans for using owls as pest control. If it’s a little strange, she’s probably interested.
