read: Before Tomorrowland (3 stars)

Before Tomorrowland by Jeff Jensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second half of this book is pretty darn fun. It's full of action and robots and alternate history and fantastic other worlds. It's good setup for the motion picture without giving away anything about that story.

The problem is that the reader is misled into believing they must wade through the first half of the book to get there. And the first half of the book pretty much sucks. One could argue that the first half helps us understand the characters better. Except it doesn't. All it does is bog the reader down with angst, tragedy and opaque mysteries. Better to hit the ground running and invite the reader to tag along. At least let them actually care about the characters. I completely understand folks who gave up.

I'm glad I didn't though. Knowing a bit more back story for the world of Tomorrowland helped me enjoy the film just a little bit more.

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