The book Chaos Theory is a teen mystery drama written by M. Evonne Dobson. This book’s protagonist is a high school student girl named Kami. Kami is a nosy, curious girl who sees people as data and nothing more. Kami gets interested when a new student (whom she nicknames “Drug Guy”) comes to her school. According to Kami’s friend, Sandy, “Drug Guy” had killed his sister by letting her steal his drugs and she overdosed. So naturally, Kami stalks this new student and finds out the truth about his sister. Kami helps “Drug Guy” solve the mystery surrounding his sister with the help of her friends, Sandy and Sam the Boy of 100 Nicknames.
Personally, I think this was an okay book. There were a few good parts, but there were also parts I did not like. I did not feel any attachment to any of the characters, nor do I remember getting surprised by any upcoming events. There weren’t many plot twists as far as I remember, so the story was pretty predictable. I don’t think a book in the mystery genre should be as predictable as this one was. One more thing I found annoying was the unnecessary plot details. There were certain moments in the book where I just thought to myself “What is the purpose of this being in the book? It is not essential to the plot and is put in only for more trouble to show up.” Maybe if some of these issues were not there, this book may very well have been a really good and interesting book. These issues could have been avoided in a few ways:
1. Making the characters more relatable. The characters were not very relatable, therefore, I did not connect to them as much as I would have liked. Having more relatable characters tends to lead to a book being more entertaining for the readers. An example of a unrelatable character was Daniel. It felt like at times M. Dobson wanted us to feel sorry for Daniel and his predicament. However, I did not feel sorry for him.
2. Making the book's plot points less obvious. If a book is in the mystery genre, the characters shouldn’t be the only ones to be questioning the mystery. The readers themselves should be trying to figure out the mystery. In the case with this book, the BIG bad was not introduced at the beginning, making the mystery not much of a mystery of who did it.
3. Taking out or edit the unnecessary moments. Like I said above, there are moments that make me question why they are in the book in the first place. These moments do nothing or close to nothing to further the plot. The only reason these parts of the story was put in was for some extra drama. Maybe editing them to the point where they have some relevance with the plot would help. One of the unnecessary moments was the love triangle. The love triangle was not helpful to the plot whatsoever.
While these issues were not bad enough to make the book terrible, they were still issues I had that interfered with my liking it as much as I could have. Should these issues have been avoided, I believe the book would be better and a more enjoyable read.
