Chapter by Chapter

Finally a novel that gamers can relate to! As a fan of MMOs and RPGs, the premise of Doomed by author Tracy Deebs sounded interesting and like my cup of tea. The first thing that I think really caught my attention about the novel was the cover, not the one that it has right now but the old one with the three main characters on the cover. That is what had me most interested, after reading the description hearing that it was a sci-fi retelling of the old Pandora’s Box story, I was dying to get my hands on the story and guess what? All the hype that I raised for myself on the book was worthwhile.Doomed takes place in a mostly present day world where main character Pandora wakes up on her birthday without receiving any word from her own mother. To her surprise, her Dad is the person who contacts her instead, after being gone for years and abandoning her—he sends her a link that consists of pictures of Pandora and him in her childhood. When Pandora logs onto the notorious Pandora’s Box MMO she discovers that somehow she has released a worm into the internet that, according to Pandora’s Box, will destroy the world in ten days.Pandora finds herself quickly swept up in a deadly game on Pandora’s Box where every riddle-like mystery in the game leads her on a trip to discover how to beat the game. On her trip around the United States she finds herself travelling with two extremely hot guys, Theo and Eli. Both of them are practically Superman and Batman the epitome of perfectly attractive. Pandora travels around the country with them in search of the answers she needs to save the world from the Pandora’s Box threat while on the run from Homeland Security and the FBI. What Pandora discovers is that the worm was built to bring total annihilation and that it was created by the one person Pandora can’t believe would do this all to her; her father.I think that the first thing that made me diehard for Doomed was how GTA (Grand Theft Auto) the characters became as the people of Earth grew more and more desperate. Not only is there no internet but soon there is barely any technology left that can function and in our world, no technology is a pretty bad thing considering how reliant we are on it. As desperation grew in the world, so did the anarchy and it’s shown on multiple occasions how evil some people can become in the Doomed universe. I personally think that the biker highway scene was one of the most memorable, simply because it was one of the most powerful and realistic scenes in the entire book.My absolute favorite thing about Doomed was the three main characters; Pandora, Eli and Theo. Every character was so much more different than the other and there was a lot of character growth as the novel progressed. I think that out of the characters I’ll admit that I disliked Eli the most, he wasn’t all that serious about the situations at hand until his life was on the line, but still as the novel progressed he did grow more serious. Between the characters there is a type of love triangle and since Eli is Superman not as serious as Batman Theo, I kept on screaming at Pandora to fall for Theo already. He’s Mr. Tall, Dark, Brooding and Handsome. Who doesn’t want that? I want that and in short, I fell in love with Theo.Doomed is a novel that I think Gamers will really fall hard for, especially since there are a ton of scenes that describe the world of Pandora’s Box and I’ll admit that it was bringing me back to my World of Warcraft days (because only cool kids play MMORPGs). Because of that, I would recommend Doomed to Gamers, fans of YA romance (especially love triangles) and readers who want a story that will thrill you until the very last page.