The premise--that the existential mechanics of reincarnation can be "hacked"--grabbed my attention right away. That is groundbreaking, in my book, tempting me to give it a five star rating out of hand. My hopes, and my expectations, were sky high as I began to read.
"Whispers" is book two in its series. The author did a good job filling in the back story, though it was not all done up front. I enjoyed the ride as the pieces fell into place.
Reizo, the central character, lost his girlfriend in book one. She lives on in the next world, though, the place where souls go in between earthly incarnations. She is allowed to communicate with him and sets in motion the events of book two. Reizo doesn't know he's quite a powerful soul and finds himself juggled around by events that threaten to overwhelm him before he can mature into his full powers.
Carmina, the hacker, is a sixteen year old prodigy thanks to the preparations she has made in previous lives. She and her friends have struggled for a "thousand lifetimes" against the status quo, and are now finally able to strike against the reincarnation system conceived and managed by a figure named General. His system of mixing young and old souls on earth with certain statistical proportions allows for maximum overall soul growth, he claims, but Carmina thinks it allows for too much suffering, as well, as too many young souls with strong egos run roughshod over those around them. She believes a different model would allow souls to grow more quickly and with less suffering. Past lives should be remembered, and those who act in violence against others should simply be...removed.
Carmina and her team have developed a technology that bridges the ego on earth to "cloud memory," the reservoir of past life experiences. That, when paired with the reincarnation "hack," allows her to create communities comprised of volunteers with the hope that their success will snowball into a worldwide movement. As book two continues, each of these communities fall short of the utopia Carmina expects. Why would that be? In my opinion, the answer to that question is the heart of the book, and any book written in this new sub-genre.
As the book progresses, the plot and dialogue pair together to comment upon and challenge popular (Western) notions of agency, karma, suffering, and finding meaning in life. Are the characters analogues of the Christian paradigm? If so, the author is truly breaking new ground.
I don't see "Whispers" as a critique on Christianity so much as an invitation that the reader to shake off any paradigm they may have and to allow the story to frame and posit a very old question, is ours the best of all possible worlds? And, as a corollary, would we actually change things for the better if we could give it a go?
Mr. Rowe has done a fine job with a very, very ambitious premise. He leaves unanswered how two old souls can come to opposite conclusions about something so fundamental as suffering, or how one can simply never question it in all that time, but that is also a very, very old question. And the action scenes are pretty good. He earned his five stars with room to spare. What a great book for a reading club. I would join one just to talk about it.
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