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Book Review - The Einstein Prophecy

I have been fascinated by science fiction stories since my childhood. From Jules Verne's wonderful "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" to Andy Weir's "The Martian", sci-fi books have never been boring. Till I read Robert Masello's "The Einstein Prophecy".

This book was suggested by the Kindle bookstore as number one popular book in sci-fi category. With a print volume of only 326 pages, I immediately bought it on my Kindle.

The story is set in the World War II era with the Allied powers facing off the Axis powers. The story moves briskly at first with good description of the environment and the war situation. Our hero is a US military officer Lucas. Yes, despite the book's title Einstein is not a major player in the story. Also, he does not make a prophecy. Lucas is trying to find an ancient object which will allow Allied forces to defeat Germany. Apparently it is something so important that even Hitler is also looking for it. After setting up this intriguing plot, the story takes a meandering form. If you have seen The Mummy series of movies, you will know what I am talking about.

To be absolutely fair to the book, the story is set on a great premise which could have a lot of potential if presented correctly. Instead for nearly three-fourths of the book, the story does not reveal what that secret object is, despite not much going on in other parts of story either. In many places the author begins describing the trees, birds and surroundings when the story should ideally be revealing the next big secret. It almost seemed that the author ran out of ideas and was just trying to fill in the pages to make the publisher happy!

The end is underwhelming and not worth whatever time you spent reading the story. If you are going to read the book anyway, keep your expectations very low. Also don't try to correlate it to Einstein or any of the historical occurrences.

Good luck!

Rating - 2/5
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