Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Nice and fast paced but the writing and dialogue was a let down for me - it felt very flat and didn’t have a lot of emotion behind it. As a result, I found it hard to connect with the characters and their stories

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book had an amazing plot, but I felt the characters were a bit hard to connect to.

Thank you kindly to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy.

3.5 stars

First of all, I'd like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to have early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

Summary:

Kierk, a neuroscience brilliant student, is living on the streets on his car after a heavy fight with the director of the doctorate he had been undertaking. Alone and with personal issues, he receives an invitation to be part of a postdoctoral fellowship, which would allow him to hit two birds with one stone and try to get both courses certified and done, getting his life and fame on the field again. But someone seems to be obsessively attacking every scientist working with him.

This is am adult psychological thriller that keeps you hanging. You need to understand the characters' struggles to survive and to push forward on their studies; the importance of their investigations.

The main topics are neurosciences, conscience in the brain and, especially, neurophilosophy, so this book gets deep in to reflections and different opinions on the topic of consciousness, ethics and how to approach them when investigating. What should be our main hypotheses? Where to stop to make sure we're not damaging our participants or the damage is minimal? When does your investigation become an obsession and forcing you out of reality?

This book is topic driven, which means everything that happens is focused on taking the reader on a ride through the reflections the author wanted to discuss. The plot is logical and, as crazy as it may seem, it is feasible. We also get to know and understand each of the characters, their emotions and the reasons for their behaviour. However, I didn't attach to any of them and did not feel them particularly likeable, but they don't have to be.

Being into the fields of psychology and neurosciences, I understood the discussions that took place throughout the story, but if you know nothing of these, you'd get deeply lost, so I recommend this book if you have at least some idea of what it's being mentioned, given that it goes deep on the topics mentioned.

This book was very interesting and fast-paced, the author held my attention and the plot was very appealing. I would recommend this book to friends.

Interesting, but very long-winded. I had trouble staying focused. The characters are very good though. I’d check out this author again.

It is a very demanding and technical book for a normal reader who just wants something to entertain himself. Too dense for my taste.

I wanted to like this book. I tried to like this book. I marveled at the knowledge base of the author. But in the end, it was too dense with technical verbiage, and not dense enough with the plot. If I had felt that the jargon added to the story enough to necessitate that kind of deluge, I could support it. The balance just wasn't there. The characters weren't developed enough for the reader to invest, and I couldn't find a person to support. In the end, it was a struggle to finish. The information was on point and was interesting to me, but it outweighed the story.

I was very interested in the neuroscientist lead character and found him a compelling guide to the novel. However, it lost me a bit because it felt very jargon-heavy. If I were a scientist I think I would have enjoyed it more, but this one was a little lost on me. I think there's an audience out there for it - it just isn't me!

I would like to extend my gratitude to the author, publisher and NetGalley for sending this advanced reader's copy in return for a fair and honest review.

I did not like this book one bit. I did not like the characters; felt they were very shallow and not very interesting. I did not like the story; it was written in a strange way. More academically written prose for me. I had to read certain parts of it several times to get full understanding. Unfortunately, I just did not like it.

Kierk is a homeless neuroscientist who is given the opportunity of a lifetime when he is offered a prestigious Crick Scholarship at NYU. This involves a lot of research on conciousness as well as testing on animals, much to the dislike of an animal welfare group. However when one of Kierks' colleagues ends up dead, he can't shake the feeling that it wasn't an accident.

This book is alot! It's part neuroscience text book and part murder mystery. I loved the latter but the former was dry and heavy as well as confusing. The other thing that annoyed me was the fact that every chapter began with Kierk showering for the day. I appreciate that he had great hygiene but it became monotonous. However, it may have been purposeful and I just can't see why. I did love the characters though. This would be a good read for those interested in science.

Thank you to @netgalley for gifting me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Revelations sets out on a promising track, with a group of top scholars pulled together to find the origin of consciousness. Our main guide to this world is enigmatic bad boy Kierk, who has already walked away from the field once before in disillusionment, only to be pulled back in out of desperation. He and his coopetition are working together for a year on various projects, but only a few of them will get coveted positions at the end.
Despite this start, the actual explorations of consciousness are few and far between, as other tropes like love stories, murder mysteries, and sabotaging activists contribute some degree of intrigue, and flashbacks to other characters' backstories distract from any plot.
There are some really great scenes, like the much-built-up confrontation between Kierk and his mentor that should have probably had a mirror much earlier in the book, while some things were more enigmatic, like switching to the second person during intimate scenes.
Overall, I would have appreciate much more about the actual theories of consciousness that Kierk alternately wrote off or obsessed over, as well as those of the other scholars. It is truly fascinating how a series of electrical impulses somehow becomes a self, and whether the self was there first as a cause, is the effect, or is somehow both, and what conditions are required for that to form and if it could be replicated. More revelations on that front would have made this a more unique and special book, but it was still thought-provoking and interesting.

I do not understand why this book is still listed for me I send my feedback three years ago. Sending this to remove,

In my time as a reader I have only ever DNF'ed one book. And I strongly considered not finishing this one. I didn't find any of the characters likable and most of the writing was so dense and hard to comprehend. I felt dumb trying to read this. It was work. Kierk was not a character I can related to or would even want to spend any time around. I was initially excited about the thought of there being some large mystery to unravel but it all felt very haphazard and unfinished. It seems to me like the author is trying to show how smart he is. Well mission accomplished, I can tell you are very intelligent but it doesn't make for good or enjoyable reading.

**I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Happy to include this title in the spring Thrills and Chills roundup, the list of notable new crime and mystery titles for Zoomer magazine’s Club Zed book section.

Honestly I was /so/ excited heading into this book because it was offering me a postdoc murder mystery written by an actual neuroscientist... what I got was a pretentious, mostly nonsensical, and jargon-heavy discussion on consciousness with dropped plot threads of a murder mystery and a romance thrown in.
I connected with none of the characters. Carmen was written as the Perfect™️ woman with zero flaws, which is weird in comparison to Keirk who is utterly infuriating and pretentious the entire book (the only plus side is that every character except for Carmen acknowledged this). Like... why does Mrs. Perfect like Mr. Anyone-who-doesn’t-agree-with-me-is-useless? Who knows. Not important.
The book was self-indulgent with long winded philosophical discussions on consciousness. It’s /so/ jargon heavy that even being in an adjacent field to neuroscience, I was struggling to follow Kierk’s internal monologues about 82% of the time and we spend the most time in his mind. So unless you have your PhD in Neuroscience and specialise in consciousness- you may feel very lost with this one.
This book had a lot of potential and there were a few moments I did enjoy, but they were vastly overshadowed by the negatives. The omniscient 3rd person was not used very well and contributed to the chaotic feeling by bouncing back and forth between main and side characters. The mystery is never /really/ solved and there’s this really weird sort of supernatural element that hops in at about the 80% mark and just???? This book is just chaotic and needed to pick a lane. I struggled through this book just to write the review. It took me about 2 months.
The author is a distinguished consciousness researcher... but his fiction debut left a lot to be desired and I feel really bad because I wanted so much to love it. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really recommend it, especially if you, like me were hoping for a nerdy-science murder mystery out of this book.

The idea of the novel is very intriguing. It is about brain and consciousness, there is a lot of descriptions about the way brain functions which was quite interesting. But, you get tired of that real quick if there is no movement in the story. That was a big hurdle in getting through the book.

I think I’m a bat, therefore I am – A book review of The Revelations by Erik Hoel
Do you wish you had David Hume on speed dial? Do you sit and meditate and wonder, “Who is the thinker?” If someone told you that the ‘B’ in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stood for Benoit, and you laughed or if I told you that Benoit B. Mandelbrot contributed greatly to the study and understanding of fractals and upon that understanding you laughed, then Erik Hoel has written the book for you.

I first heard of the existence of Erik Hoel while listening to a podcast hosted by a psychologist and philosopher. They spoke to a paper that Hoel had written concerning dreams, art and entertainment. I found the discussion fascinating. Upon looking at the episode notes to find the paper itself, I noticed that they linked to his upcoming book. Without even a second glance at what the plot was, I was in.

There is a plot, don’t let the book fool you, like it did me. Several PhD hopefuls get chosen for a Crick Scholarship (named for Francis Crick the co-discoverer of DNA) in NYC. One of them falls to his death in a subway tunnel. Or. Was he pushed? There are nefarious goings on with local grassroots anti-science, anti-animal research groups. Did one of the other Crick members do their cohort in in order to save his/her spot in the 2 spot post-doc they’re aspiring too, or one of the religious members of the covert animal rights groups?

Let me stop here for a second. I personally do not think that “spoilers actually exist”. No don’t worry I’m not spoiling anything, and when I get close I’ll give fair warning. Here my thing, in relation to The Revelations. I personally wish I had read ‘spoilers’ for this book. If you like magic and you wanna know (or at least have a sporting chance of figuring out how the trick is done) you have to understand misdirection and where to look. With The Revelations you’re expected to look one way but because of that, when I was done, I was pissed. At first. It took me a few days to realize what I should have been paying attention too and what was ( not superfluous) but not what I feel Hoel’s intention of what I supposed to get. As in dreams, there is Manifest vs Latent.

Klerk Suren (ala Kierkegaard, another famous name in philosophy ?) is obsessed with the idea of consciousness. What is consciousness? And not just the basic “it’s what it’s like to Feel like You” and “it’s who you are between waking up and going to sleep”. How does one “Self” become continuous between those times, what keeps You being You after you dream? We beigin with Kierk as he gets beat up by thugs while he is living in his car having giving up his search after a “disproving” everything he and his mentor have researched. It drove Kierk to the breaking point until he grasps at his last change; the Crick scholarship. Funded by the NSA, Kierk finds himself once again searching for meaning amongst competing philosophies and hypotheses as to what exactly Consciousness is. Our protagonist is most assuredly an antagonist, bordering on psychopathy. We are enveloped into Kierks dreams, sexual exploits, depression, outbursts and copious writings.

I’ll admit once again, after finishing the book. I disliked it, plain and simple. Yet upon reflection and when I realized what was actually was happening ( and what actually happened in the end, provided my own hypothesis is correct) I began rethinking how much I appreciated the novel as a whole.

Penultimate paragraph till minor spoilers!! I can certainly recommend The Revelations for it’s discussions of consciousness. It’s gets heavy at times but Hoel never truly lets the reader get bogged down in too much jargon. As he does hold a PhD in Neuroscience, he knows what he’s writing about and understands that many of us may not, so he is able to reconstruct much of the research into relatively understandable, maybe even dare i say, conversational, monologues and discussions. Come for the murder mystery, stay for the philosophy. I gotta give this book high praise for it’s handling of the philosophical, theoretical discussion but mid-range points for the manifest tale itself and the fact that it hides what’s really going on under too much “mystery”.

But first I’d like to thank #netgalley and #abrams / #overlookpress publishing for availing me an ARC from which to base my review on.

Spoilers. Kinda I’m not actually giving anything really big away. Just kinda giving a heads up to what I wish someone had told me.

My biggest concern is that the meat and meaning of the book in underneath the veneer of a mystery plot. If you pick this up, do your self a favor and put an extra heavy focus on the dreams and Kierk’s journal writings. That’s all I’ll say (because not everyone is on board with my “there is no such thing as a true spoiler” world view.

I had a really fun time reading this one. Many a time I found myself lost in it labyrinthine plot and beautiful prose. It is so much like a mystery wrapped in literary fiction that there were times I forgot what genre I was reading. That was a different experience; one I wholly enjoyed. The intellectuality on display here is something to be marveled. I didn’t completely understand all of the jargon but I didn’t care. I loved every character here and I thought their balance of motives and desires was extraordinary. There were a few issues but nothing egregious. The pacing was a little off for my liking (it was just a bit too long) and the ending was kind of meh. This is a very exciting new author that I’ll look forward to reading in the future. Highly recommended.

Thank you for this opportunity.

The book failed to grasp me from the get go. The premise was interesting, but the structure of the story was confusing at times. I had to re-read multiple parts and it hindered the plot.