Vibrational Passage

Vibrational Passage
Jennifer Dustow & Kimberly Miyasaki Lee
Publisher: self-published by the authors
Source: the authors
★☆☆☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

This was the first time an author, or in this case, authors, had contacted me to review a book specifically for my blog.  The summary they gave me in the e-mail sounded outlandish, but I was so excited to have my first request that I went against my gut feeling to decline and accepted.  There's a reason people say to always go with your gut.

After I read the first chapter I was sorely confused.  I put it down for a couple days, read it again, and then decided that since it wasn't going to get any clearer to me, I was going to plow ahead and finish the book.  That was one of the first problems I had with Vibrational Passage: too many characters, too many organizations, and too many plot threads that made reading the book confusing on the whole.  I feel like a lot of the backstory was in the author's heads and was not put down on paper, leading to some of the confusion.  In contrast, other parts of the story had too much back story, which made me feel like I was reading a boring textbook at times.

My second problem was the plot itself.  Vibrational Passage is filled with 9/11 conspiracy theory.  Coincidentally, this is one of the reasons I read the first chapter twice; I couldn't decide if I should be offended or not.  This year is the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and quite frankly I think it's too early for such outlandish fiction to be written about it.  Perhaps others will disagree.  Additionally, I found it disgusting that some of the main characters almost hailed the Nazi's medical "research" done by their "doctors" at concentration camps and were trying to continue on with it.  At one point Peter says, "Please do not confused us with the Nazis... If we succeed... there would be compliance without wars or weapons or bloodshed." (p.196)  But one can be a Nazi without war, weapons, or bloodshed.  The whole thing gave me the willies.  This ties into Autism plot thread, wherein some characters were trying to do something (again, confusion) to control the minds of autistic children by using the methods of the Nazis.

Seriously?

Then there is the usual problems found too frequently self-published books.  It could have used a once over by a couple editors.  Too many commas, misspelled words, misused words etc..  For example, the world is not on an "access," it's on an "axis."  I see that they have published this book as paperback as well.  I hope it didn't go to print as it was in the ebook.

Finally, though this did not affect my rating, I didn't care for the fact that the authors had rated their own book on Goodreads.  Their ratings have since been taken down but one of the author's ratings is still on the book's Smashwords page.  This doesn't sit right with me. 

PS: The fact that this book was provided free to me by the authors also did not affect my rating.  Clearly.