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3.5
The Box and the Dragonfly (The Keepers, #1)
ByPublisher Description
Artifacts. Miseries. Mysteries . . .Artifacts. Miseries. Mysteries . . .
From the moment Horace F. Andrews sees the sign from the bus—a sign with his own name on it—everything changes. The sighting leads him underground, to the House of Answers, a hidden warehouse full of mysterious objects. But there he finds only questions. What is this curious place? Who are the strange, secretive people who entrust him with a rare and immensely powerful gift? And what is he to do with it?
Horace quickly discovers that nothing is ordinary anymore. From the sinister man lurking around every corner to the gradual mastery of his newfound abilities to his encounters with Chloe—a girl who has an astonishing talent of her own—Horace follows a path that puts him in the middle of a centuries-old conflict.
Horace’s journey leads him and Chloe deep into a place where every decision they make could have disastrous consequences. Most important, it links Horace to the Box of Promises and a future he never saw coming.
With an action-packed blend of science fiction and fantasy, Ted Sanders creates a world where everything is more than it seems and where friendship and loyalty have the greatest power of all.
From the moment Horace F. Andrews sees the sign from the bus—a sign with his own name on it—everything changes. The sighting leads him underground, to the House of Answers, a hidden warehouse full of mysterious objects. But there he finds only questions. What is this curious place? Who are the strange, secretive people who entrust him with a rare and immensely powerful gift? And what is he to do with it?
Horace quickly discovers that nothing is ordinary anymore. From the sinister man lurking around every corner to the gradual mastery of his newfound abilities to his encounters with Chloe—a girl who has an astonishing talent of her own—Horace follows a path that puts him in the middle of a centuries-old conflict.
Horace’s journey leads him and Chloe deep into a place where every decision they make could have disastrous consequences. Most important, it links Horace to the Box of Promises and a future he never saw coming.
With an action-packed blend of science fiction and fantasy, Ted Sanders creates a world where everything is more than it seems and where friendship and loyalty have the greatest power of all.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Box and the Dragonfly (The Keepers, #1) Reviews
3.5
“the first time i read this, it must've been about 2018. it was just sitting on my shelf for years, and i'd completely forgotten everything about it - even whether i'd liked it or not. all i could remember is that it felt super long to my 9-year old self. this time around, i think i read this in about 4 days? how times change.
first things first, what a plot. time travel is never easy to write, including closed loop time travel. but the fel'daera is such an interesting method of closed loop time travel, if you can even call it time travel. future-seeing? prescience? precognition? whatever its name is, it makes the power interesting without being overpowered and without using a deus ex machina. very well done, sanders.
and then just the idea of the tanu and tan'ji i think are also really interesting. they're like superpowers, but they're so specific that they don't feel generic at all. i mean, the alvalaithen; i've read this book before so i knew vaguely what it could do, but it genuinely took me by surprise when we got to see how chloe's ability evolved throughout the book. neptune's tan'ji as well is very specific; limited enough to not be way too overpowered, but not so limited that she still feels like she has some kind of relevance to the story. gabriel's is a little more cliché, but admittedly, his kind of ability is exactly the kind i would give to a dungeons and dragons character, so who am i to judge?
i'm in two minds about the worldbuilding. it feels very immersive and i love everything about tanu as a concept (any kind of material / object based magic i will always find cool). however, i do feel like a lot of information about that worldbuilding was withheld from us for no reason other than convenience and mystery. and then when we did get stuff explained to us, it was in a very "here's all the information that's convenient for you to know" way. or a new aspect of the worldbuilding was introduced in a way that does sadly feel quite deus ex machina. the grulna is the best example i can think of - it makes sense that something like that would exist, but the fact that we would only hear about it when we do just feels very convenient. i do also understand, for that particular example, why it wasn't brought up earlier, but it just irks me. it definitely comes across as convenient, that much i know.
the characterisation is also quite mixed. horace is a fairly well rounded character, and i understand that this is magical realism and all of it is to be taken with a pinch of salt, but no one's internal clock is that accurate. especially not when you're effectively buried & haven't seen sunlight in 24 hours. chloe is a great character; you understand the gist of her without her feeling too much like a caricature or underdeveloped. hapsteade and meister are... questionable. hapsteade especially. they unfortunately do feel a little like caricatures, which is sad because they could be so much more. the same goes for neptune. and, until the last chapter, horace's parents confused me a little, but what seems very much like neglect of their child does get explained - and in a VERY interesting way. the ending of this book is, as they say in the industry, peak.
of the remaining characters, i don't feel particularly qualified to talk about gabriel, but he didn't feel too flat most of the time. and dr. jericho was a damn good villain, particularly in that final part. i do love an intelligent villain.
i don't really have a lot more to say, to be honest. the writing style flowed very well - if i can read it in 4 days, and about half of it in under 24 hours, i think that speaks for itself, really. this was very enjoyable - not quite shelf of honour, but a very respectable middle shelf. i WISH this series was still widely available, because that bombshell at the end? GIVE ME THE NEXT BOOK IMMEDIATELY.”“Idk I think I’m gonna dnf it it wasn’t a bad book it was actually quite good I just have no motivation to finish reading the series it took so long to even get through this book”
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