Foothold

by F.T.G. Thornton

What started out as a small New Hampshire college town turns into the last foothold of mankind left in the Universe. This is the story of a group of college kids whose ingenuity both contribute to and save them from a man-made black hole. As the world descended into apocalyptic spiral these bold young adults find a way to not just save themselves, but the entire town with them. Alone and in possession of a unique technology, the last of our kind quickly find threats and hope lie around every corner.

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 5, 2012

Reviews

[Graham Downs · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this book. It starts slowly, and is at times quite confusing. In fact, I was quite a few chapters in before I realised the story was set in the future, and although I do remember it saying, I couldn't tell you what year it was set in.

I'm still not entirely sure what caused the main event of the book. Let's just say that something happened, some kind of experiment went wrong, I think, and now the world is about to get sucked into a black hole. The protagonist and his friends find a way out, though. I'm not entirely sure how that came about either, but never mind, because I will admit that it started getting interesting from that point.

I was a bit frustrated, though, because the version of the e-book that I was reading suffered some formatting issues. First, there was no linked table of contents, which I think is pretty much essential in an e-book, because it's not easy to quickly page forward and see how long you have to go in the current chapter, like you can with a print book. Then, every once in a while (about once per chapter or so), a screen would end in mid sentence, and the next screen would be starting a new paragraph. I don't know why this is, but I doubt it's my e-reader, because I haven't seen this problem before. Thankfully, I was able to deduce from the context (most of the time) what I must've missed.

The ending was okay. There was some deux ex machina, but it wasn't as clichéd as I was expecting. The book in general could have done with some proof-reading and basic editing, though. Incorrectly used words, typos, and punctuation issues are fairly commonplace.

Not a bad story, all-in-all. I just wish it were packaged better.

[Maddy Knapp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult to keep my attention. Has a lot of potential but is lacking some way of being a gripping novel. I liked the idea of an Apocalypse happening and how the characters move to another world pretty much but I didn't understand some of what was going on; some parts weren't very clear to me. Especially the beginning. I had no idea what was going on. Again this novel has some great potential to be a lot better than it is now. I think because I don't read much Science Fiction that that could be why this wasn't keeping my interest throughout the novel. I would however recommend this novel to whoever enjoys reading Science Fiction and they know a lot about the events that are happening in the novel.