Book Review: Mammoth Rider by S.J. Poyton

 

 

This is a new release I've been anticipating! Spoilers ahead!

Ash is a girl who grew up in an Arctic research center which monitors a population of genetically altered elephants ("mammoths"), with her father being a legendary researcher among them. Ash and her friends, Ruby and Jack, are invited to a special event at the center, where they discovered that one of the important staff members of the center, Ransom, is acting suspicious. It's now up to Ash, Ruby and Jack to save the mammoths from Ransom and the poachers he's working with. Especially Nayala, a white mammoth Ash has bonded with, is depending on her for protection. 

I don't mind a book using old tropes and storylines, but I do think that, if you're gonna use an old exhausted plotline like "save the animals from the poachers", you gotta bring something new to the table. This book, unfortunately, does not. Except for the animals in question being rewilded mammoths instead of something else, I guess.

I found the main characters of Ash and Jack to be incredibly generic and bland. Ruby is the only character I felt somewhat of a connection to (with her being a real firecracker), but aside from her most of the cast of this book was just pretty boring and forgettable. The villains were also obvious from the start and very one-note, and Ransom especially is really over-the-top evil, to the point he monologues like a cartoon villain and he's a little hard to take seriously.

I'm also not a huge fan of how much this book is bootlicking Colossal Biosciences, a company I really don't care for. Not to mention the fact that technically speaking these aren't even true mammoths, but instead genetically altered Asiatic elephants. And the book addresses this point, but doesn't succesfully dismiss it. Saying "people who criticize don't think that these are true mammoths but we think they are, therefore they are" is not a successful dismissal of this argument. 

The author is also obsessed with phonetically typing out sound effects, which was really annoying and repetitive. Instead of writing "the mammoth trumpeted" we get stuff like "PAWTOOO" typed out many, many times. 

So yeah, not a great book. I didn't hate it or think that it is outright bad, but when your book is painfully bland and generic and doesn't stand out in any particular way, I feel it needed some work.

Rating: 3/5