3.5 stars. A really interesting premise for a book. Could have been written better.
Recently, with the holiday sales, I picked up a lot of books. I picked up titles that I would not normally pick up because they were cheap or free, and the books’ summary interested me.
So I recently picked up Ocean Slayers Racing.
The idea here is that our hero Oto lives in a world where cars are sentient. (His name is Oto and the world has sentient cars… get it?) Oto was a scrub, a nobody, who had no system and no special skills. And then one day he encounters some alien tech that “reboots his system”. (Nanites are an underused trope.)
The brother and sister who find him dying outside the city limits rescue him, and decide to take him into the world of car racing. Where he gets behind the wheel of a car for the first time, and it goes very well.
Things I liked about the book series:
- I liked the sci-fi aspects, the car aspects; most of the LitRPG I read has magic but no technology
- Characters that I mostly care about
- Some touching emotional elements
- Light reading
- A touch of romance, not explicit
Things that took away from it:
- The flip from “the main character being effectively helpless” to “the people helping him being helpless” was very fast, in a single story day effectively
- The writing is uneven. There were parts of the book where I didn’t understand what was happening, and I had to go back and reread it a few times, and still didn’t understand. There were a couple of typos.
- I can think of many examples, but the most glaring one is the age of the car the MC Oto eventually chooses and is bonded to.
- “Ivori’s over a thousand years old,” I said to only a nod from him. – Book 1
- Year-27188. We were in 27514… she was 253 years old. – Book 1
- “No,” Luca said. “How old is she?” I smiled then, knowing. “Three hundred and twenty-six. She’s only just starting to open up to me,” I said. – Book 2
- I mean, how old is this car? “Over 1000”? 253? 326? This kind of inconsistency breaks the story.
Anyways, despite the uneven writing, I am going to read the second book after finishing the first. It’s light reading, and I do want the characters to succeed.
After reading two books, I stopped. Sorry, but the writing wasn’t that good. I do love the premise though.
