THE LOST CODE by Kevin Emerson

The Lost Code
Kevin Emerson

Rating: C-
Release Date: 05/22/12
Synopsis from goodreads.com:
WHAT IS OLDEST WILL BE NEW, WHAT IS LOST SHALL BE FOUND.

The ozone is ravaged, ocean levels have risen, and the sun is a daily enemy. But global climate change is not something new in the Earth’s history.

No one will know this better than less-than-ordinary Owen Parker, who is about to discover that he is the descendant of a highly advanced ancient race—a race that took their technology too far and almost destroyed the Earth in the process.

Now it is Owen’s turn to make right in his world what went wrong thousands of years ago. If Owen can unlock the lost code in his very genes, he may rediscover the forgotten knowledge of his ancestry…and that less-than-ordinary can evolve into extraordinary.


My thoughts on the book:

When I requested this book, I was like "Yay! I love Atlantis and mythology! Weeee!" However, that was the only bit of excitement I really felt about this book. The book wasn't bad, it just wasn't something that I could relate to. I think part of the problem is that the narrator and main character was a teenage boy, and I've never been a teenage boy. That made it hard to relate to him right away. I guess he seemed pretty authentic for a teenage boy, albeit a bit G-rated. I've put a lot of thought in this and I put of reviewing this book because I couldn't figure out what it was that made me reject all of the characters. I finally came up with the answer: This book is written for a younger audience. That has to be it. I couldn't relate, and it was very G-rated and very immature at times. So, I think this was written for a junior high/early high school audience. Considering I'm an adult female college student, this did not work for me at all. 

This story started out slowly, but in the second half of the book, the pacing picked up substantially. I mean, you'd think it'd be action packed because it started out with the main character dying, but I didn't feel a sense of urgency there. And Owen is about the most boring character I've ever read. I didn't really care if he died. He just didn't have much of a personality. I never knew what Owen was feeling other than confused. That also made it hard for me to connect to him or any of the other characters. Since I was seeing the other characters through his eyes, they all seemed boring because he described them in a boring fashion. 

The idea behind the story is great, but I do feel that it could have been executed better. I needed to care about Owen before I cared about any action that happened, and I did not. Also, I think that more information and more of the suspenseful occurrences should have happened in the first half. Not necessarily at the beginning, but in the first half, at least. I think the way this book was laid out was just all wrong. First, we needed character development so that we cared about the character. Without the "so what?" question answered from the beginning, the reader is not going to care about the rest of the book. Next, we needed something to keep us reading past the first half of the book. Give us some more information and some more action. Third, the book needed a romance that actually felt like a romance. Any romance in the book (there was very little) was also boring and lacking feeling. It was also incredibly G-rated, which leads me to think that this book was meant for a younger audience. 

Overall, I'd recommend this book to kids in junior high who want to read a mythological adventure story. If you're over the age of 14, I'd say check it out from the library first. 

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