Book Review: One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence

In January 1986, fifteen-year-old boy-genius Nick Hayes discovers he’s dying. And it isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to him that week.

Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons-playing friends are used to living in their imaginations. But when a new girl, Mia, joins the group and reality becomes weirder than the fantasy world they visit in their weekly games, none of them are prepared for what comes next. A strange—yet curiously familiar—man is following Nick, with abilities that just shouldn’t exist. And this man bears a cryptic message: Mia’s in grave danger, though she doesn’t know it yet. She needs Nick’s help—now.

He finds himself in a race against time to unravel an impossible mystery and save the girl. And all that stands in his way is a probably terminal disease, a knife-wielding maniac and the laws of physics.

Challenge accepted.

My Review:
The first thing that caught my eye with this book was the cover-it is simple but the use of colour does make it interesting to look at and that made me check out the blurb. It sounds exciting with time travel and a sort of retro 80's feel to it, which led to me hoping to have another book as good as Ready Player One. For me it didn't quite deliver what I was hoping for and expecting. That said, I didn't find it a really bad book...I just felt it didn't live up to my personal expectations of what it was going to be.

Let me start with the good. I never played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid as none of my friends were into it but I was aware of what it was and I thought it sounded quite interesting. A few guys in my school played it and one of them led me to those Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I enjoyed. Anyone else remember The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and the Citadel of Chaos? Sadly I had no luck with dice rolls so I always died. I'd have liked to have tried D&D though. I actually found that the parts of the story where they were playing the D&D game to be the most interesting part of the book. I liked reading about the choices in the game and the way the story went from calm to battle so quickly. It was fun to sit with the group and see their individual personalities play out in their characters.

Simon is socially awkward, prone to inappropriate comments and reactions when something unexpected happens like finding out about Nick's illness and having to go to a party and deal with people. In the game his character is always keen to run away or hide, which was amusing. Elton is the guy who is the game master which suits his outgoing personality and I very much liked him and his father, who we meet at the party. John in reality is the good looking one who gets most of the attention, though he isn't the sharpest tool in the box at times. He is the D&D character who is brash and reckless, making questionable decisions. Mia is initially the outsider who forms a connection with Nick. She gets involved with drug dealers to get cannibis to help ease Nick's pain and that bravery carries over into her game character. Nick is the solid glue in the group both in and out of the game.

The book is set in Britain in January 1986, and being an 80's girl myself, I enjoyed all the pop culture references especially the music which I remember well from my schooldays. It makes a pleasant change to have a UK based book, rather than struggling to work out some of the US pop culture references, some of which I've never heard of. I was comfortable with the setting which was nice. As the book begins Nick has been told that the crippling growing pains that he was suffering from are actually terminal cancer. I did know that this was part of the plot when I picked up the book, a subject that I generally try to avoid reading about in books so it made for a grim start to the story for me. His gradual medical decline during the harsh treatment brings back some pretty unhappy memories for me but that is hardly the fault of the author and that never affected my rating of the book. It has made me decide to really avoid the subject in the future though.

I am pretty tired of this constant YA cliche of having the school bullies causing trouble for the group of our MC's. When we had school bullies, the area we lived in was big enough that we never saw them out of school but in these books, the MC is always bumping into the bully. One is the typical mouthy bully who likes to pick on people that are different, doing petty things like emptying the contents of their bags out. The other bully Rust is a raging psychopath who is thrown out of school and begins a new career as a drug dealer which brings him into conflict with Mia and Nick. He becomes the constant that they are trying to avoid every time they leave their house. It's not my favourite thing to have in the plot. The book goes into this aspect more than anything, with everything Nick and friends doing leading to more trouble with Rust, who seems to be everywhere they go.

The other dominating aspect for the book was the teen romance between Mia and Nick which had no chemistry at all for me. The only thing they seem to have in common is D&D. There seemed to be no interest between the two of them until Nick announces that he has cancer. Nick didn't even talk to Mia so why she and John just come to get him that night to go dope smoking is a bit strange. Mia then starts visiting him to give him illegal drugs to help his cancer which gets her into debt with drug dealers and Nick tries to help her out with that problem. There was nothing in their previous interactions to suggest any romantic interest and they just seem to suddenly be together for no good reason. I just don't get it really. It goes a lot into Mia's difficult home life, Nick's hospital visits, dodging Rust, going to a party and teen angst stuff. To be honest I also can't be bothered with dope smoking, drunken kids in the books I read so all the drug and party stuff didn't interest me at all.

The other thing that switched me off was the amount of scientic lectures that Nick subjects us to. We get lectures on Einstein's theories, maths, quantum mechanics, physics-all things that I find really dull and outside of my interests. It just bogs down those scenes where Nick is telling people his thoughts on the subjects. I get that the author is clever with science but I didn't need lectures on things that didn't add anything to the plot. It kind of felt like showing off what he knows through Nick and it wasn't needed. The plot is that a time travelling man Demus, comes to tell Nick that the Mia of the future that he knows has an bad accident that destroys her mind, and this guy has come back to 1986 with a device to collect a copy of her memories to reboot her mind in the future. OK I at least get the point of the mission. He spends a bit of time trying to convince Nick and Mia about his mission and why they need to help him, giving them evidence that he is from the future.

Trouble is, the chip Demus needs for the devices to work won't get made for another two years and he can't come back in 1988 to get them so the kids have to risk their lives and future to steal a prototype of it from the factory where John's dad works. Why would Demus ever come back two years before the chip is created or send kids to do the job instead of doing it himself? What is the point of doing this? Why trust kids with your Mia's future? What if Mia is caught or killed in 1986 and it changes everything? The answer from Demus to these questions always is 'I remember it that way and I can't risk changing anything in case it changes her future' which I found a bit unsatisfactory. It then gets really weird during the hesist when Nick considers trying to alter the future which goes against everything Demus said about keeping things the same! It just got a bit dumb for me. We also never really get any planning for the heist, which is weird when Nick is meant to be a genius, and no planning with Demus. Demus is in it way less than I expected given that he is the one with the information and when he is there, Nick never seems to ask him anything. 

Overall I was pretty disappointed by this one in many aspects and I don't like the ending at all. I wanted more on the planning of the theft, more of a group interaction with Demus, a bit more meat to the actual plot of future Mia rather than just the teen angst side of things. I've had a bit of a struggle as to what to give it and finally settled on this rating. I won't be reading on with the series.

Read November 2019
2.5 stars.