To balance out the French characters we have Jason’s hometown rival Barnaby Becker, and Prince Xavier Xonora who hails from a small Italian principality located near France…okay, Xavier is a half example. To be fair this does tend to pop up in most Mathew Reilly novels, and it didn’t bother me that much. She’s something of a surrogate big sister to Jason, and I loved their constant banter.Īlso, on a minor note, pretty much every French character who appears in this novel is a complete jerk with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Also, for those concerned about a potential lack of female main characters, we have Jason’s mech chief Sally McDuff. Admittedly, I don’t know much about real world racing, so I can’t say if that was supposed to be some sort of commentary. One of the big things with Ariel is her having to overcome the sexism and prejudice within the racing world. It made their relationship more unique, well, that and the three year age difference between them made romance unlikely. I liked that she and Jason were merely close friends rather than love interests. In other notable characters we’ve got Ariel Piper, the sole female racer at the International Race School. It also makes his hard work and victories feel genuinely satisfying. This makes all of the races genuinely suspenseful sense there’s no guarantee that Jason will come out on top. He has to actually work for his victories, and there are just as many times that he fails as when he succeeds. A lot of people’s complaint with Speed Racer is that Speed is a boring invincible hero who is guaranteed to win no matter what, but that’s not the case with Jason. What I liked about Jason wasn’t so much what he was as what he wasn’t. The book itself even describes racing hover cars as being akin to racing fighter jets. The most obvious influence is, naturally, racecar driving, but the way matches and tournaments are arranged contains elements of tennis, cricket and even soccer.
Mathew Reilly has mentioned that he deliberately inserted similarities to real sports so that readers could identify with hover car racing even though it is fictional. One of the great things about this book is the applicability of hover car racing. Blame it on all of the Mario Cart I used to play, but I’ve always had a soft spot for racing stories.
This was a really fun book, pure and uncut fun. The plot and action moved by like a speeding hover car, but it never felt rushed or poorly paced. Everything that happens has some significance in advancing the plot. If you’re sick of books that spend too much time on filler, padding and introspection then you’ll enjoy this book. This book had been on my to-read list for a while, and I’m certainly glad that I finally got around to it. He may write books that are primarily intended to be fun and entertaining, but it’s clear that he puts a lot of hard work and effort into his books. What makes Matthew Reilly such a talented writer is the way that he is takes concepts that seem cliché and manages to make them feel fresh and exciting. That having been said, it doesn’t make the book any less enjoyable. Yeah, if you’re thinking that this book kind of sounds like Harry Potter meets Speed Racer, you wouldn’t be too far off. Jason and Bug are about to be in for the ride of their lives. Before long Jason and his little brother Bug are whisked away to the International Race School in Hobart, Tasmania. Jason has just lost one of the biggest races of his life, but he’s also attracted the attention of former racing champion Scott Syracuse. The book follows a fourteen-year-old hover car racer from Australia named Jason Chaser. The sports of racing has also been revolutionized by hover technology, and hover car racing draws millions of viewers and captivates countless nations. Hover Car Racer takes place in the not too distant future where transportation has been revolutionized thanks to magneto hover drives which draw power from the Earth’s magnetic field.