Customer Reviews

Satellite Down

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4 star:		(3)
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Satellite Down is a well-written story touching on themes of commercialism and its impact on both teen-agers and the world in general. The main character, good-looking high school senior Patrick Sheridan, is swept into a world where the superficial rule over the intelligent. We get to see the once well-mannered, religious, naive texas native who believes in hard work and real journalism be morphed and changed by ideas of beauty and success as a television news reporter. He learns more about himself and what he really believes in through his mistakes. By the end, he begins to think he had it all right in the first place. Rob Thomas, creator/staff writer of "Veronica Mars" and author of three other books, demonstrates his best work through this interesting and inticing novel that any person living in todays modern world can relate to. In a book with a plot centering on hollywood and the "evils" of commercialism, one would expect something generic and unimaginative. But this is a wonderful story that is not sugar coated but at the same time, is not too angry or too accusative. It does not set the blame on consumerism but on the inability of humans to resist. It is a relatively fast read that will leave you thinking.

Satellite Down is, quite simply, the best Young Adult novel of the year. Patrick Sheridan, the main character, is brilliantly captured at the exact moment in time when he comes to understand once and for all that life is not a free ride. His adventures in the tainted, corrupt, and vapid world of television news, both in front of and behind the camera, are right on the money. The knockout punch of Satellite Down, however, is Patrick's soul searching journey for his roots through the rugged Irish countryside during the latter part of the novel. It is, in a word, flawless. The final sixty pages do more than represent the best writing in Thomas' canon. The closing stands as one of the finest examples of writing in the Young Adult genre, period. While an entire cottage industry has evolved around catering to melodrama and tidy sitcom closure in teenage "literature", Satellite Down dares to wander down a different path. The path of truth. The truth of how awfully life can treat us sometimes. About how it can be difficult, and messy, and without concrete answers at certain points in our complicated, ever changing tenure on this planet. Few authors choose to wander down this path, and with good reason. The possibility of rejection is enormous when you write about the emotional trials of life, especially when you fail leave a pot of gold at journey's end. In past novels, Thomas has masterfully portrayed the language and the urban rituals of the age group he has adopted as his own. With Satellite Down, the author broadens his trajectory by unflinchingly portraying the ambiguities of growing up in an age of constant media bombardment and rootless family angst. Rob Thomas would have done a disservice to the reading public, and the adolescent reading public in particular, had he made the choice most authors would've - pulled a rabbit out of the hat to make everything all right on the last page. Thankfully for us all, Thomas did not. And even more thankfully, he is good company. Would Rumble Fish remain the same powerful allegory to the devistating nature of fate had S.E. Hinton herself ignored the Wheel of Fortune and saved the Motorcycle Boy? Would The Chocolate War be revered as a landmark testament to teenage cruelty if Jerry's resistance to the Vigils had ended with anything other than those shattering blows in the ring? Rob Thomas is one of the few individuals writing for adolescents today who could legitimately follow in the footsteps of those YA authors we have seen fit to canonize. Satellite Down is the next big step toward securing his place in that pantheon.

David Scoma

I was just listening to Rob Thomas being interviewed along with Steven Levitan and John Enbom on the Nerdist Writers Panel podcast, wherein he recounts basically living a version of this very story (except he would have been one of the adults in it, and not the protagonist, Patrick...). Pretty interesting subject matter, here, and although this book really leaps around to a lot of new places without ever really backtracking, we get a lot of interesting characters, as well. As a protagonist, I find Patrick in a downward spiral, starting at the peak of his idealism and plummeting from there. If this book had a sequel set 10 years later, I think we'd find Mr. Sheridan a bitter, burned out guy just kind of going through the motions of work and sex and booze...

While I'm definitely a fan of Rob Thomas' books and shows, this title (like his other previous books, specifically) suffers from a few things that, as an adult reader, are a bit difficult to slog through. For one, Thomas seems to always fill his books with a character that's just too naive to be taken seriously. In this case, it's the main character. Patrick is always asking people what fairly common slang terms mean because he's just such a down-home country boy... It's just not believable, as though no Texan teenager has ever used slang or heard rap music before. Also, some of the pop culture references have become dated, ten years past the book's first publication date. Not a huge deal, but a little bit like, "Oh yeah, Shaquille O'Neil had just become hot back then..."

What most of the reviews and synopses that I've seen fail to mention about this book is the really great bits set in Ireland towards the end of the novel. As I said, it leaps around a lot, but those passages had me wishing that the entire book was just about a teen running away in a foreign country. Patrick really only ever seems happy when tending bar in a tiny Irish village, and the characters there really shine in their short page time. Then some sort of unrealistic stuff goes down VERY quickly and it's back to Texas, with a pretty interesting and dark finish.

So all in all, this might be my least favorite Rob Thomas book, but only because his other efforts are SO good. This book falls short of being GREAT simply because I feel like it needed a little more grounding and a lot more closure. You'll definitely be left wondering what happened with a lot of the characters, but maybe when television stops being a thing, Mr. Thomas will grace us with another tale set in Mr. Sheridan's universe...

Patrick is the editor of his high school newspaper and he is looking forward to a career in journalism, so when he gets a chance to enter a contest to become a TV reporter for Classroom Direct, a national TV shoe beamed to school by satellite he jumps at the chance. He figures it's a long shot, so why bother telling his parents, they wouldn't let him leave his dusty Texas town anyway. But Patrick is selected and convinces his parents to let me go out to LA and build on a promising journalism career. After Patrick realizes no one read his application(he was selected on looks alone), he becomes disillusioned and ultimately runs away on a soul searching journey. The book ends with Patrick very cynical and leave you with just a mirror to take a look at yourself.

After the publication of _Rats Saw God_, I waited with greast anticipation for the new book by Thomas...after a few years have gone by, this book _Satellite Down_ has placed Thomas back on the top of he list of auhtors for teens. If you get a chance to listen to Johnny Heller narration of any of Thomas' books it's the perfect voice.

I finished this book several days ago and find myself still thinking about it. I highly recommend it to teens and adults who want something they can mull over for a while, as well as those who simply want a good read.

My conclusions? I found it interesting that Thomas treats Patrick's disillusionment almost as a natural progression rather than a series of choices. Patrick doesn't seem to debate much about whether to do the things he does; he simply does them. Maybe living in Hollywood is like that for everyone--I've never been there--but I can't shake the feeling that this book tells us more about the author than it does the main character (no offense, Mr. Thomas). That's MHO; y'all read it and see if you agree.