Digital Delta

by G. Outlast

A high school girl finds herself in a frustrating situation. She is forced to combat evil, even though she has no interest in it. She begins falling for a boy. However, the boy seems to have the opposite desires. As the digital force, will these two teens save the world or be forced apart by the evil they face?

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 2, 2024

Reviews

[Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!* · Rating 1 out of 5]

It gets props for providing one of my favorite new sentences:

"I'll eat your banana!" alerts a small, strange-looking monster-looking monkey.

Pure gold. But like gold, if you eat more than a tiny bit of it, you're going to feel sick.

That's not actually true. You can apparently eat gold harmlessly; it isn't digestible and you'll just shit it out. What I want to know is, what kind of edibles did this author consume before ejecting this material, because the only reasonable excuse is being constantly high, and/or fourteen years old.

Digital Delta is a short book suitable for Wattpad or fanfiction sites. It's got some keen enthusiasm behind it and the action mounts to a suitable climax, but the writing is so, well, typical for Wattpad as written by someone fourteen and/or constantly high who consumes nothing but anime, it would be extremely challenging to parse what was going on were I not someone who was reasonably familiar with shonen anime and Power Rangers. Power Rangers is what it most resembles, but instead of drawing energy from the Morphin' Grid, or Power Coins, or Dino Power or whatever, this story's teens draw it from Digital and the energy is called data. Does it have anything to do with the digital world or virtual reality? It does not.

Anyway, some young teens who as far as I can tell have unmedicated ADHD are assaulted by monkeys who think all humans are bananas, then later they join more teens and fight bigger monkeys, then older teens pop in and they all fight a giant gorilla multiple times and then the big boss and then the bigger boss and yay they win. There are some tepid teen romance moments and bizarre family interactions too, but 80% of the text is fight action. Is it good fight action? It is not.

It's extremely hard to read. This is partly because of the typical amateur writing of this ilk, for example:
*constantly flipping between past and present tenses,
*strange passive action descriptions,
*skewed quotation mark placement,
*inventive dialogue tags—my favourites: "...," she reverberated; "...," frats the character; "...," he thought out loud,
*frequently stating the tone a character uses, and so forth.

The botched and fluctuating paragraph formattting sure doesn't help. Some times the text is double-spaced, sometimes also with random hard line returns, and then it jumps into fully indented paragraphs, while at no point is it possible to tell where a true paragraph is meant to start. This picture is typical of the e-book:



Most of the difficulty was simply plowing through the extended action scenes, which again form the vast bulk of the book, incorporate all of the above literary injuries, constantly shift POV, repeat names at high density, and generally fail to create the intended thrill with its play-by-play accounts (line spacing is as per the e-book):

“Hey! Over here! I won't let you continue doing injustice!” rang out from the determined Gina, who transformed. As Gina's data rose, Mobius smirked before snatching Thema in a sudden fashion and hurling her at Gina. As Thema was coming in hot, Pink shot up and darted in the direction of the flung Thema. At the same time, Mobius lunges at Gina. Gina was shocked by the sudden action. However, Gina leaps over Thema and Pink. As she was in midair, Mobius attempted to strike her down. Mobius' heavy fist of dark data came down on Gina. To Mobius's surprise, Gina lunged with the intent to do massive damage, despite how close Pink and Thema were. Gina's crackling roundhouse kick met Mobius's heavy fist. On initial contact, sparks of dangerous data spring forth like a fountain. Before hitting the ground or being struck by the destructive data Gina and Mobius were releasing, Thema rolls and snatches Pink. After allowing the skateboard to take most of the impact, Thema rolled to one knee and raised her skateboard to shield her and Pink, whom she had by the collar. Gina and Mobius's data crackled and popped as they stood in a deadlock. Neither of them wanted to give an inch. Thema watched in awe as the two struggled furiously. In a moment, Gina and Mobius were forced apart by the extreme buildup of data. To Thema's surprise,

Gina's legs weren't shaking as much. though they were

still shaking up a storm.

“Good, save Gina!” calls out a pumped Thema.

One more passage to illustrate all of this:

Erica screeches, “That's it! Get out of my sight!” And, with

that, Erica's data explodes like an erupting tsunami,

causing the rest of our heroes to wash away from the

pressure. MK didn't hesitate to do the right thing for Erica.

As MK figured, Erica rocketed toward him like a warhead.

MK's aura was like butter on Erica's blade. She slashes

through the aura and continues towards MK. MK smirked

as Erica came within reach. Suddenly, MK's aura retracts

toward him. The dark data is eradicated on impact with

Erica's immense light aura. However, Erica's rage made

her aura unstable, causing her to be vulnerable. MK

gracefully evades Erica's sweeping swing. After dodging,

MK releases a thin, laser-like, dark data beam at Eric's

gem that is not glowing.

Whew! So that's Digital Delta. It gave me a few chuckles but most of it was like, why?

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never experienced a book that was so difficult for me to read. I thought for sure there was something wrong with my digital copy, and perhaps there was. I wish I could have continued, but alas I had to give it up.

[Jess Conley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. It was a very hard read. I don't know if that was the intention or if it needs a good editor. I couldn't take anymore of it but an extra star for the attempt to make a fun story.

[Katrina Zarubinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read - extremely needs editing

The formatting and writing style make it very hard to read. Choppy sentences, switching from past to present narration, it all needs to be rewritten, because the actual story is very entertaining and captivating. It has action, romance, fight between good and evil, everything you need for a successful YA novel.

[J. Rose Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun young adult adventure

Digital Delta is a fun YA adventure set in a society where AI and VR experiences dominate day to day life. The author crafts an entire world; and then asks the question what happens when technical advancement goes “unchecked”?
The cast of characters each had unique elements and were relatable. I had trouble with the formatting of this book, but all-in-all it was a fun read.