A decades long family feud meets an unbelievable force from outer space in Nomad.
4 out of 5 stars
The biggest and scariest event in the Earth’s known history is coming right for us, and we had no idea it was happening until a few weeks ago. The problem now is we can’t see it, we just think it’s there because it’s effecting the gravity and placement of other planets in our solar system. The object (or lack-of) hurtling at the Earth is nicknamed “Nomad”. This is the story about some of the people on Earth who find it, and who know its coming.
I’ve never listened to an audiobook narrated by Keith Szarabajka, but he does a superb job. He changes voices enough that the listener doesn’t get confused if more than one person was speaking. Nomad was a book that needed a throaty voice even though one of the main characters was a rock-climbing, adventure seeking girl. I think that Keith did a great job embodying the different characters and the story. Mather should be proud of the work that he did for this. I’ve never had a problem with a Blackstone Audio book, and this one is no different. Production quality was great and I had no issues.
I can tell that this book was a set up for a sequel. But I’m not as mad as I usually am by this fact. There was a lot going on and I don’t think Mather, a master of thrilling fiction, could have fit any more into a story.
The story kind of chugged along at the beginning at a snails pace. I couldn’t really figure out where the fortress in Chianti was going to come in. Or the characters other than the main female character and her family. I won’t lie, a few times I had to read the description to see if I was reading the right story. But once Mather started sprinkling in the apocalyptic forces that were “raining down” on the earth that no one could see or even detect.
The scariest part about Nomad is that it could happen. That absolutely scared the heck out of me when I was listening to this late into the night. There were no monsters, no zombies, no mass-murderers. Just an outside force that has the potential to destroy every living soul on the planet Earth.
Nomad was good. I think that if he continues it, it will be great. It loses a star for me due to pacing and confusion. Just the flipping between “the world is going to end” and “hey, I’m an extreme athlete and I’m in Tuscany in this giant fortress” confused me more times than I could count on one hand.
There were a couple times where there was an “ah ha” moment between the main character and “Nomad” which I thought were kind of neat. As a reader, it’s always nice to see growth in a character. And when Jess realizes that she is similar to the main antagonist of the story (Nomad). That part made the book for me.
Overall, a great apocalyptic story with some confusing but fun elements. My favorite parts were the radio broadcasts that were being “played back.” It was fun to figure out who those people were and why they were radioing in (and to who).
Mather fans, I don’t think this will disappoint. Lots of eluding to other forces at play and a lot of fun action contained within these pages.
Book Description:
Something big is coming…big enough to destroy the entire solar system…and it’s heading straight for Earth. That’s what Dr. Ben Rollins, head of Harvard’s exoplanet research team, is told by NASA after being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. His first instinct is to call his daughter and wife, who are vacationing in Italy: Something is coming, he tells them, a hundred times the mass of our sun. We can’t see it, we don’t know what it is, but it’s there. They’re calling it Nomad, and it’s coming fast. In just a few months, the Earth may be destroyed.
The world erupts into chaos as the end approaches – and Ben discovers that his wife and daughter are trapped in Italy. The key to humanity’s survival may rest in the final answers he pieces together in the midst of his frantic scramble to find his family before Nomad swallows the planet.
About The Author:
In just three years, Matthew Mather’s books have sold over a half million copies and been translated into sixteen languages, with 20th Century Fox developing his second novel, CyberStorm, for film. He began his career as a researcher at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, before starting high-tech ventures in everything from computational nanotechnology to electronic health records, weather prediction systems to genomics, even designing an award-winning brain-training video game. He now works as a full-time author of speculative fiction.
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