Dangerous Days of Daniel X Dangerously Bores Readers

By Evan K.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Superman was written poorly?

Congratulations you now have our main protagonist Daniel an alien "protector" from the stars that's gifted with incredible powers of creating nearly anything with his mind. and the most dangerous job on the planet. Wipe out the most villainous trash on the planet one by one with the help of The List. A top 100 list of the bad guys on Earth that he must destroy to keep the planet safe.

Of course every great hero needs to have a tragic back story. At the age of three The Prayer, number one on Daniels List, killed his entire family. Barely escaping Daniel finds himself out in the cold alone and orphaned. Years later he returns for his father's greatest treasure, The List and vows to kill the alien, who killed his parents and every alien along with him.

The story picks up as Daniel progresses through his teenage years. After killing his latest foe and escaping a few truant officers he decides to head into the big leagues of alien hunting. He's going after Alien number 6 on the list Ergent Seth. After researching local kidnappings and disappearing children Daniel knows it's time to act and destroy Seth now and end the rampage while he can. Only Seth is not going down without a fight.

This story has holes in it the size of cannon balls. Daniel himself comes off as almost unlikable in the first few chapters and has an ego taller than the Empire State Building. With his power of "Creation" through the story it's hard to think that he's ever going to lose so the dramatic tone is just wasted. Daniel here doesn't seem to know the basics of power scaling in this story. Your character is supposed to gradually grow stronger but Daniel seems to be able to just make up new powers like we're in the silver age of comics.

Don't get me wrong it had the potential to be a good story I saw sparks that kept me going. Cool ideas, a nice selection of powers to utilize and a cool villain. After reading it though I felt like the main character didn't really learn anything. He didn't have any development over the story. Nobody had any development. Nobody learned anything. The book is a waste of your time.

I can not recommend most people to read this story unless you are a hardcore fan of aliens and Superman. Because that's what this is! A bad Superman knock off that does a poor job of portraying anything that gives me an attachment to this book. It's almost insulting that this series has four more books after it and just to let you good people know, the last book is finally getting published in July.

You can find the book at your local Barnes and Noble, local library and it's sold online as well on sites like Amazon. The price listing for it is $8:00 and even still I feel like it should be lower.

The Dangerous Days Of Daniel X by James Patterson, Little, Brown and Company, June 15th 2010, 272 pages