Title: Elixir
Author: Ted Galdi
Date Published: August 5th 2014
Format: ARC, 242 pages
Source: NetGalley
Meet 14-year-old Sean Malone. He has an IQ above 200, a full-ride scholarship to one of the country’s top universities, and more than one million dollars from his winning streak on Jeopardy. However, Sean wishes he could just be normal.
But his life is anything but normal. The US government manipulates him, using him as a codebreaker in pursuit of a drug lord and killing innocent people along the way.
For reasons related to his personal security, Sean finds himself in Rome, building a new life under a new name, abandoning academics, and hiding his genius from everyone. When he’s 18 he falls in love. The thrills begin again when he learns that his girlfriend is critically ill and it’s up to him to use his intellect to find a cure, a battle pitting him against a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company and the demons of his past.
Elixir is a story about identity, secrets, and above all, love.
Review:
If a story’s protagonist happens to be a genius, I would automatically expect for that story to have a lot of genius shenanigans going on in it. You see, I have this ridiculous obsession with intelligent characters and their trickster ways and since they’re quite rare, being intelligent alone already gives them a plus point. That said, I had quite the high expectations for Galdi’s Elixir but while the book didn’t necessarily reached those expectations for the most part, Elixir still provided a pretty quick read for me considering I’ve been on a reading slump for several months now, and that alone is saying a lot.
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I find Sean to be an interesting character. He’s down-to-earth, determined and loyal. He’s complex but also simple at the same time. I didn’t get attached to him like I wanted to. In fact I felt so far away when reading about him but nonetheless, it was actually pretty refreshing and he was okay to watch from afar. The other characters though… I simply do not care about. I tried to, but I couldn’t bring myself to do just that. They all seemed flat. Only Sean got some nice character development here and the others were just… there. .
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The romance isn’t something I’m all too happy about as well. I appreciate Sean going through all the dangers just to save his girl but any romance that starts with a love at first sight is not for me. It doesn’t help that Natasha looks exactly just like the girl Sean has been imagining since he was so much younger, which is just weird. I still can’t wrap my brain around it, to be honest. .
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Plot-wise, I’d say that Elixir has a lot of things going on with it which is nice but sometimes, it has waaay too much things going on than necessary and it’s all forcefully packed in such a short air time that I had to do a double take before I could absorb everything. But on the bright side, it made the reading so much quicker and it had me on the edge of my seat multiple times. .
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Elixir definitely could have been a better book. It has the potential but I find it lacking in some aspects. It’s action-packed and very fast-paced which I’m sure readers would like. Maybe if the book was longer though, it would be more organized and natural to read. .
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Thanks a lot to NetGalley for the copy!
Rating:
2.5 Fairy wings!
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