Book ReviewSnapshot by Brandon Sanderson [CC]

Hey! What's up, you guys? It's Connor, and
today I'm going to be doing a book review on Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson.
If you guys don't know, Snapshot is a science fiction novella that came out
this year. It was published by Vault Books, and I actually ordered this book a
really long time ago. And then it took like five months to get to me, so I was
really excited when it finally showed up, and I could immediately jump into the
story, and read it. This one follows a detective named Anthony Davis, and in this novella the United States has developed a new government.

They're not the current
United States, and there's actually this place that is a city state that's right
next to the US that I guess the US has abandoned. And that city state is where
the main character, Anthony Davis, lives, and they are the ones that are in
control of this technology that's called a Snapshot. Basically the entire city
can be recreated, and everyone has a copy of themselves in the snapshot. Then
these detectives can go in to the copy of a day and find evidence that they
have been having a hard time finding so they can track bad people that have done
crimes and figure out where they stashed money or weapons or whatnot, and that's
what Anthony Davis is doing.

He and his partner are trying to track down some
evidence so that the people in real life can go and find the evidence and then
use that in their cases. It's definitely got some butterfly effect vibes because
if you do one thing differently in the snapshot, a whole chain of events is set
off, and so the day isn't exactly how it happened. The detectives have to
be very careful about which things they affect and which things they don't. If
they wake someone up that wasn't supposed to be up, it changes the entire
course of the day, and it causes what's called a variance.

And then it affects
the validity of anything that they find, so they want to keep the variance low so
that the validity is high. Anthony Davis and his partner are not really
considered real police men anymore -real detectives- because they deal with a
reproduction of the real world. And so when Anthony Davis hears a rumor about
this one call that went into the police that wasn't really reported and isn't in
the records, they decide that they want to investigate it and figure it out for
themselves. That's the basic premise, so as usual with my book reviews, I'm going
to go through my pros, my cons, give you my rating, and be done.

My first pro for
this book is just that it's a really high-quality book. Vault Books is a
smaller publishing company, and they somehow got their hands on Snapshot. And
so they decided to release limited-edition, leather-bound copies
which is what this is. It has a dust jacket and then the inside is the
leather.

And each one is numbered and signed, so I have 818. And indeed it is
signed, and then these there are also pictures that are not in any other
edition. There were also 72 lettered editions, but they were way more
expensive and they had a couple of more things than this edition had. But I did
not feel like spending that much money on a book that's this short.

This edition
in itself was quite expensive. It's like 50- something dollars, and, you know, it took
me an hour to read. But it is something that I really wanted. It's something that I really
wanted to have in my collection.

Another pro is going to be that this was
insanely fast because it was so short but also Brandon Sanderson just has a
very quick writing style that you can easily get into and easily understand. I
found it incredibly entertaining, so once I started it, I didn't put it down until
I finished. With this amount of space I. Think that Brandon Sanderson did a
really good job with making Anthony Davis a really believable character and
one that you can really empathize with.

He doesn't have the best home life
situation, and he's had some things that have caused him to be in the position
that he's in. Other than Davis though, you don't really get any backstory to any
other character at all which is fine because this is really just about
Anthony Davis trying to investigate this situation. But it would have been nice if
some of the other characters were a little bit more fleshed out or there was
a little bit more about what has been going on. Another pro for this is going
to be that I really liked the layers of the story.

With such a short book it was
really nice that he was able to add all of these different layers to the story,
and you can really see as the story goes along how these different layers are
going to stack on top of each other and where the overall narrative is going. So
I really really enjoyed seeing all of that and trying to figure it out for
myself as I was reading it, and when you reach the end, you're like, "Oh wow! There
was all of this stuff.", And it was actually one of those situations where I
went back and reread certain sections just so I could really see everything
that he included. Now I'm going to talk about really my only con that I had with
this. I found the ending extremely, extremely abrupt.

And so it just comes, and then
that's it. There's the ending, and you don't really find out too much
information after that or really any explanation
about what happened to the characters after the ending of this book. In
the end it ended up just being very abrupt, and that was kind of a big deal for me
because it ended up making me not like the novella as much as I was hoping to.
But I still enjoyed myself while reading it, it was just at the very end I wanted
more. Overall I really enjoyed my experience reading Snapshot.

I ended up
giving it 3.5 Stars, 4 stars. If you're wanting to pick up
something very quick by Brandon Sanderson because most of his stuff is
extremely long, I would probably suggest either picking up The Emperor's Soul or Legion before picking this one up, but if you end up really wanting to pick it up,
then you're not going to be disappointed. That's going to be my review on Snapshot
by Brandon Sanderson. If you liked it, please give it a big thumbs up and
comment down below if you've read Snapshot.

Did you even know this book
existed? If you know of any books that are similar to this one, let me know
those down in the comments, and I will talk to you guys next time. Bye!.