TV Series Review: Salvation

SALVATION

SYNOPSIS:

An MIT grad student and a tech superstar bring a low-level Pentagon official a staggering discovery--that an asteroid is just six months away from colliding with Earth.

REVIEW:

I don't often review television shows. Honestly, it takes a lot to make me want to. I recently stumbled upon the show Salvation and binged it nonstop. Salvation is a science fiction show that centers around a potential world killing asteroid on a direct path to Earth. With very little time to stop the asteroid and the United States on the brink of war, time is running out to save human kind. I found the writing for this show reasonably believable and able to be felt on a deep level. Of course, to go with great writing you also need an outstanding cast. Among the cast are Charlie Rowe, Santiago Cabrera, Jennifer Finnigan, and Ian Anthony Dale. The brilliant John Noble also has a recurring role. Salvation makes you start to reflect on the concept of time and how much you have left. I do that pretty frequently and this show just made me do that once again. What would you do if you knew exactly how many days you had left to live? Would you panic and give up, would you go be with your loved ones, or would you continue to fight and have hope when there is so little left in the world? There is so much pain and suffering in our world today and I hope that this show will inspire people to look for the good and see the beauty. My way of dealing with all the hate has been to not spend as much time on platforms such as facebook where I see so much ugliness. I still go on there, but I don't live on it like I once did. It's been liberating.

Season 2 of Salvation will premiere this summer on CBS!

Book Review: Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

WHERE TO BUY:

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Book Depository

SYNOPSIS:

Sixteen-year-old Austin Szerba interweaves the story of his Polish legacy with the story of how he and his best friend , Robby, brought about the end of humanity and the rise of an army of unstoppable, six-foot tall praying mantises in small-town Iowa.

To make matters worse, Austin’s hormones are totally oblivious; they don’t care that the world is in utter chaos: Austin is in love with his girlfriend, Shann, but remains confused about his sexual orientation. He’s stewing in a self-professed constant state of maximum horniness, directed at both Robby and Shann. Ultimately, it’s up to Austin to save the world and propagate the species in this sci-fright journey of survival, sex, and the complex realities of the human condition.

MY REVIEW: 

Seriously… WTF was this book?

I bounced between a 4-star and a 5-star rating for about 12 hours. Mainly because this book was a lot to process, but not in a bad way. Andrew Smith is crazy. This book is crazy. The plot is crazy. The characters were extremely hormonal (they’re teenagers – boys, at that!). I cannot begin to count how many times Smith used the word ‘horny’ while we were in Austin’s, the main character, head!

Anyway, this story follows the life of Austin Szerba and his confusion over his sexual orientation. That, to me, was the primary focus. He was in love with his girlfriend (since the 7th grade), Shann and also with his best friend, Robby. Through his trying to figure out his preferences, he and Robby accidentally unleashed a plague upon the small town of Ealing, IA. People become infected/infested with parasitic “stuffs” and mutant grasshoppers hatch from within their bodies. Gross, I know!

This is definitely a weird adventure. And I don’t use that term lightly. While the grasshopper part was interesting enough, I found myself more interested in Austin and his relationship struggles. He is a comical, though horny boy who likes to feel good and he always has sex on the brain. I laughed out loud at times, especially when he was telling stories about getting in trouble for reading specific books or when he and Robby were “experimenting”. It felt awkward because it was, but it was also one of my favorite moments in the book.

The characters DID fall a bit flat for me at time, while I really enjoyed Robby, I didn’t come to learn too much about him. Shann — I really knew nothing about her personally. Austin was the only one that I can say that I kind of knew the most, but that’s because we were in his head the entire time.

This time around, I feel that Smith focused on the weird, complex plot of mutant grasshoppers and Austin’s sexual orientation experimenting. Not a bad thing, but I do kind of feel like something was sacrified for the sake of the weird plot.

With that being said, I enjoyed the book. I like how weird it was, I like Austin’s confusion over Shann & Robby. While this book is primarily about a boy’s adolescence and self-discovery, Smith threw in some Storm Trooper crap to make it more interesting. And it was absolutely more interesting. I 100% like “Winger” a lot better, but this one was not a bad read at all!

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars!