Customer Reviews

The Chaos Code

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is great fun to read. Took a little time for set up. But it's like reading Indiana Jone or The Mummy.

What are myths, stories made-up by ancient civilizations to explain the world, or actually events that are almost too outrageous to comprehend? The CHAOS CODE by JUSTIN RICHARDS brings that question to mind. When the smart, pragmatic Matt is sent to his dad's place the holidays, all he finds is an enigmatic message that leads him to his aunt's home. There he discovers that his dad was missing, most likely kidnapped while looking for a code. The code that might hold the power that caused the fabled Great Flood. Now, Matt and Robin, Matt's new friend must find the code and try to protect or hide it again to prevent the code from reaching into the hands of in wealthy manic who plans of using it due to his mad desire of almighty power. Justin Richards puts this book in a simple quick to read, easy to understand style that manages to still add the feeling of mystery and foreboding darkness in midst of the entire adventure. Great read for anyone interested in the past or likes a book where it keeps one guessing from the first page to the last. In this one book Richards seems to have filled it with a chilling plot accompanied with many surprising sub-plots that manage to keep one from putting the book down.

What would happen if the past and the now collided? Well, in the Chaos Code by Justin Richards an adventure is born. 15 year old Matt Stribling is on a boarding school holiday with his absent-minded dad. Expect, when Matt reaches his dad's home he finds a mysterious message. Following the clue he finds himself wrapped in a mystery that may decided the fate of the world! Teaming up with an unusual family friend, Robin, they try to prevent a disaster as great as the Flood. Chaos Code is a fast book with new mysteries on every page, for anyone who likes to try to get the clues and try to figure out what's going to happen next. Richards writes it in an easy to follow style all surrounding Matt. This book will never cease to surprise!

I couldn't get into to the book as much as my son did. He said, "It was a superb book. It did have its dry spots, but overall it was a pretty darn good. The beginning was awesome and it was pretty good up until the middle where it encountered its dry spot. After that it started to pick up again and was perfect from there on out. Loved the plot! I haven't read any books with that kind of plot in there. It was extremely exiting and greatly thrilling."

Matt Stribling is being sent to live with his brilliant father during summer vacation. Upon arrival, Matt finds a message from his father, which leads him to his aunt's home. Aunt Jane, Mr. Venture, and Atticus Harper explain to Matt that his father has been looking for a code and suddenly went missing.

Possibly kidnapped.

Mr. Harper tells Matt of the treasure, and the power along with it, that caused the fabled "Great Flood" -- and maybe even destroyed Atlantis.

Matt soon learns that the code is in the hands of a wealthy adventurer who plans on using the power to further his own plans to become an almighty being. It is up to Matt and his unusual friend, Robin, to stop the code from being reactivated. They must either hide the code away or protect it with their lives. . .

THE CHAOS CODE is a book that could easily be turned into a movie. It is like Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider meets The Mummy. This book is fast-paced and doesn't let you stop reading.

Reviewed by: Jeremey

I thought this book sounded exciting when I first picked this up, but I turned out to be wrong. To be fair, the beginning *is* fairly exciting. Matt, the main character, is dropped off at his father's house, only to find that his dad has gone missing. What's more, his house has been ransacked, and an intruder appears to knock Matt out cold. So what does Matt do? Call the police? Call his Mum? Tell someone he trusts about his dad's disappearance? Nope, none of the above. He just forgets about the whole incident for a while until something reminds him of it. I found this utterly unbelievable. Nobody would just *forget* about someone attacking them and possibly causing their father's disappearance! And this was just the beginning.

Throughout the book, I found the "twists" incredibly easy to figure out early on. Far too many hints were given about the state of affairs, so that the reader will know far in advance what's going on and have to wait for Matt to catch up. This might take 300 or so pages at times. It suffers from the "almost as if" syndrome; that is, whenever you see something that says "he thought it looked as if...", "it was almost as if...", or "maybe...", then it really means "this is exactly what it really is". Therefore there are no surprises for the reader. To fill in the gaps, there's a lot of speculation - mostly about where to find ancient treasures, or about ancient powers. This would probably be interesting in most cases, but for some reason it really bored me in "Chaos Code". I had a hard time reading on. No doubt this is because I was still waiting for Matt to gain a brain, or some personality.

None of the other characters were likeable either. The villain was stereotypically bent on world domination, and the obligatory female teenage sidekick was annoying and vague (even though I knew from very early on why this was so). Dull. I've seen it all before too many times. Everyone acted so predictably. There were the good guys and the bad guys, and nobody was in the middle. The good guys all shared the exact same moral viewpoint, which was boring, I thought.

The codes of the title were either ridiculously simple (it took me 30 seconds to figure the first one out, and then I had to sit through Matt's weird, convoluted and illogical thought process for him to catch up)... or insanely hard, like a near-random computer password combination made up of jumbled letters and numbers. Matt got this first try with almost no thought at all.

Matt: Yay, I know the password!
Me: Huh? How on earth do you figure out something like "g36sdfoa9" that easily and yet fail at the one six year olds could solve in seconds?

On another one, they were trying to figure out a map, and went through this longwinded process to get to their goal:

Heroes: Now, there's this theory about triangulation with the stars, and the shapes, and blah blah blah blah blah...
Me: The island's symmetrical. You've got a half-symmetrical pattern there already.
Heroes: And this is the history of this belief, and all these organisations use this special symbol, and blah blah blah blah...
Me: Just complete the pattern and make it symmetrical, you idiots.
Heroes: And the history of this is that blah blah blah blah...
Me: Argh, get on with it already! It's not that hard, and you're supposed to be experts, for crying out loud!
Heroes: Oh look, if we draw a line here, and another line here, we...
Me: Yes?
Heroes: Come up with this other pattern, and this now symbolises something else, blah blah blah...
Me: ARGH
Heroes: Ooh, look, we can complete it. We've found the location!
Me: And you took your sweet time about it.

So yes. It may have been slightly frustrating.

Again, completely unbelievable for me, and this was my impression of the book as a whole. It was boring and frustrating at once, and even the action scenes failed to raise my levels of excitement about the story. I would have liked to see more logical thought and action from the characters, instead of watching them sit around feeling that something was 'wrong' but failing to identify it. I wish the twists hadn't been so easy to figure out from the start, and I wish the villain could have been given a more original motivation. I simply dozed off and/or started skim-reading during the second half of the book, because my attention wandered from it.

Not the best novel ever.

The Chaos Code is an extremely pedestrian effort by Justin Richards. Matt, the main character, doesn't resemble any 15 year old boy I've ever met. In fact, I've known bread mold with more personality. The product of two brilliant though self-absorbed professionals, Matt is sent off to spend the holidays with his father - an absent minded archeologist who often goes off on digs without telling anyone...or apparently, packing supplies. (Strange, most scientific studies require planning, tools and graduate students but whatever).

Anyway, Dad's not home and his house has been wrecked by some creature made of air and sand. Matt then goes to see his Aunt Jane who manages an estate for a billionaire named Venture who has a daughter far too worldly for her 15 years.

There's a few mysteries thrown in which aren't any fun for the reader because you don't have a prayer of figuring them out unless you're a collector of paranoid theories about Atlantis, an expert in mathematics and believe the sphinx was designed just to gaze at the constellation of Leo...or something. (I'd sort of stopped trying to figure it out at that point.)

I was drawn to the book because of a blub by Herbie Brennan on the cover who claimed The Chaos Code was "One of the scariest things of I've read in years."

Unless you find boredom scary, don't waste your time with this.