Oh, I hate to write a negative review, but sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Rumer & Qix: The Race to Terra Incognita by Kathleen S. Wilson is a book written for young adults, a demographic that is often ignored in the wave of green children’s literature that has been forthcoming. Most green children’s books target a younger audience, so I was excited to learn about Rumer & Qix, especially since my daughter is an avid reader and loved the Gaia Girls series and anxiously awaits the next book. Both my daughter and I were seriously disappointed in Rumer & Qix.
What’s wrong with Rumer & Qix? It’s confusing. The futuristic names are hard to follow and interfere with the story’s flow. Just consider the book description:
Rumer, a petite apprentice reporter for the 31st century Global Quotidien with a flair for fashion, loves zipping across Nanjing with her loyal sidekick, Qix, in search of stories. But now, she’s furious with her boss for asking her to cover the exploits of Alfa, the planet’s wealthiest mega-conglomerate. Her parents died in an Alfa accident and she can’t understand how he can be so insensitive. She escapes into the indie networks and soon finds herself puzzling over an image of a bizarre nature sighting. Ever since the flora and fauna were replaced with Alfa’s Syncov™ replicas eons earlier, sightings like this have been routinely dismissed. When ethereal voices relay a message confirming Rumer’s hunch that things are terribly amiss, she slips away on a globe-trotting quest for answers. An epic battle is brewing between Dr. BigCo, the powerful Alfa CEO, and his nemesis, MoNa, the vulnerable matriarch of the cosmos. Will Rumer be able to turn things around before it’s too late?
Confused…try reading the first chapter. Honestly, that’s as far as I made it. I just couldn’t get into the book, and neither could my daughter. Perhaps if I could have muddled through 50 or 60 pages, I would have become engaged, but I couldn’t follow the story. Maybe it is more a fault of my attention span rather than the book itself. What do you expect for the year 3013?
It’s not your attention span or the time period. It’s the publisher.
When considering books to buy, it helps to look at the publisher. There are many vanity presses who will accept nearly any manuscript, regardless of quality. Books from publishers like AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, PublishAmerica, BookSurge, Tate Publishing and others have not gone through the rigorous process of being professionally accepted and edited.
Authors who want to skip the hard work of rewriting, revising and polishing their work…then submitting it to editors and agents for acceptance…can just submit their work to these vanity presses and see it in book form within weeks.
Such shortcuts are not available for lawyers, doctors, professional athletes or even your mailman. Anyone can publish a book these days. Even books that shouldn’t be published.
Vanity presses make their titles available through online booksellers, but you’ll rarely see them in stores. The book-buying public has no way of knowing if a book is self-published or not.
This isn’t to say there aren’t some self-published titles that are good and deserve to be read, but the simple truth is this: without editorial and professional publishing gatekeepers, weak books are produced. Looks like you found one of them.
It’s not you, it’s the book.
I, like Jennifer, was very excited to learn that a new novel with environmental themes was available for Y/A readers and rushed to Amazon.com to check it out. Encouraged by a five star review of Rumer & Qix from a young reader on Amazon and another positive review by Simon Barrett, I ordered a copy.
My daughter, who’s 15, and I both read it in just a couple of days. We’re both avid readers and loved Rumer & Qix! The premise is intriguing and the plot fast-paced. We fell in love with the characters. MoNa, aka Mother Nature, is fantastic! My daughter loved Rumer and the animets, like Qix. The author’s depiction of the future is truly imaginative and the green message deeply heartfelt. I can’t say enough about this book. After reading it my daughter was so excited she went to the book’s website and sent an email to the author.
We did not find the book confusing at all. The cover text is a bit dense, but it’s clear after reading Rumer & Qix from cover to cover that it has been thoroughly edited and revised. In her acknowledgments the author thanks an editor, who, after a bit of googling, I discovered works at a literary agency.
This is the author’s first book and I have to commend her efforts. It’s next to impossible for a new author to get a book published through traditional channels these days (unless her name is Madonna), especially since the global economic crash last year and the subsequent downsizing of publishing companies worldwide. Booksurge is a new kind of of publishing option for fledgling authors. It takes time and money for authors to get their books out there through these emerging digital publishers. My daughter and I are two readers who are glad this promising author went the distance. We are eagerly awaiting her next book.
Just wanted to add that the publisher of Rumer & Qix, Booksurge, is an on-demand publisher. With Booksurge, books are only printed as they are ordered, not before, so there is no inventory. And, no inventory means that fewer books are printed and shipped to warehouses and stores unnecessarily and fewer trees are killed in the process. Using companies like Booksurge is a more environmentally-friendly way to publish books. p.s. Everyone at my house really enjoyed reading Rumer & Qix.
Thanks tj, that’s very interesting and good info to know about the publisher. It is also good to hear from so many readers that actually made it through the book.
Thanks, Jennifer. It’s always nice to know that most books find their audiences and most audiences find their books. The opening chapters of Rumer and Qix did not seem confusing to us, but instead typical of other fantasies we’ve read. Fantasies seem to pack a lot into the opening chapters in order to fill readers in on the history, geography, time frame, rules, people and language of the imagined fantasy world. This is a way to tip readers off to how different the world of the story is from the real world. We must be in the intended audience because it worked for us.