A Review of AJ Scudiere's “Resonance” - 4 Stars

I enjoy sci-fi and suspense. But, the sci-fi needs to be plausible and the suspense needs to be able to keep me from sleep. This only partially works for Ms. Scudiere's novel.

I found the premise very interesting but never really fully explained as to why shifting the magnetic poles would cause animals to go into a coma and potentially die. If that was the case then wouldn't we see strange results from analysis of people in MRI machines or from the people who use NMR to do research? We don't see people falling asleep in the MRI (that often), so this theory, while interesting does not seem that plausible. There are also those people, two of the protagonists, Jillian and David who can fall into a coma in one world, and wake up in another. Is an interesting plot-line, but goes a bit into the supernatural, why should they be able to do wake up in either time line when not many other people can?

Also, the idea that this phenomena killed off, or placed the dinosaurs on another earth is interesting, so if birds are what evolved from our dinosaurs, what happened on the other side? This question along with why Jillian and David are“special” and a lot of other questions go unanswered, they are just either vaguely speculated or ignored.

OK, now to suspense. A.J. Scudiere is a suspense writer. Suspense should be able to keep you awake at night and you have to force yourself to put down the book. There were many nights where when reading this book I fell asleep, maybe it was all the talking about comas. Really there is no way to truly be suspenseful with this story. Yes, it is a cataclysmic change to the world, but it is not done with explosions or tidal-waves, but with people and animals falling into comas and possibly dying.

Hopefully, her later works are more suspenseful, because she does market herself as a suspense author, and is definitely genre-bending. I really liked the originality of the story and still gave this 4 stars even though I am critical of the science and a few other aspects, I love to see originality in writing.