The Hatching (The Hatching #1)

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was an exciting suspenseful book. The author did a good job building tension. The biggest issue I had with the book is that the first part of the book jumped around to too many characters and too many settings/situations. I am used to these types of books having to move around to various places and people to set up the conflict for the reader. In this book however, the author introduced way too many people and jumped all over the place. Too much detail was added to situations that really had no bearing on the story: did we really need to know that the lady who herded sheep had lost her husband and daughter a long time ago, or that the scientist from India was dumped by his new girlfriend? Way too much time was spend setting up these little vignettes and adding detail that really did not matter in the long run. And that took away time that could have been devoted to developing the main characters and the plot. It seemed like all of a sudden the scientists were discovering things about the spiders without the readers being able to follow along, because the readers were forced to learn about a random dog's bathroom habits.
Then with about one chapter to go, the reader realizes this is only the first book of a series. While, at this point, all of the time spent developing the multitude of characters and situations starts to make more sense, it is disappointing to learn there really is no resolution in this book. It really is just one extremely long introduction.
I do feel with a few slight changes these problems could have been resolved. *** Contains spoilers---In the last chapters the readers could have been allowed to follow along with the scientists as they made important discoveries about the spiders. The military could have launched an attack on the spiders and beat them back. And then the characters could have discovered new spiders and egg sacks in the very last pages. That would have at least have provided some sense of a climax and resolution before the characters moved along to the next part of their adventure.
I would probably read the next book to see what happens to everyone, but this first book definitely could have been better.


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