Book Description:
Twenty years ago, a UFO crashed into the Yellow Sea off the Korean Peninsula. The only survivor was a young English-speaking child, captured by the North Koreans. Two decades later, a physics student watches his girlfriend disappear before his eyes, abducted from the streets of New York by what appears to be the same UFO.
Feedback will carry you from the desolate, windswept coastline of North Korea to the bustling streets of New York and on into the depths of space as you journey to the outer edge of our solar system looking for answers.
Review 4 of 5 Stars
I’ve been a bit remiss regarding getting a review up for this book as I was a beta reader for it and read it before it came out. Obviously, I was provided with a review copy of this story. I’m currently working on two books of my own and like most other writers have a full-time job (Yes, this is the rationalization for my procrastination). On with the review.
I loved the way this story started right at the beginning of the mystery and in the action. Following our pilot friend, John Lee, as he crashes and makes his way through hostile territory to locate the young English-speaking boy who was the survivor of a UFO crash gets you right into the story. I like when I’m immediately sucked in.
From there the story swaps back and forth between North Korea 20 years ago with our pilot friend and modern-day New York with the main character of our story, Jason. Jason is a student and space geek like oh so many thousands across the world, who just so happens to find a strange girl standing on the street corner for hours on end in the rain outside of his apartment. Being a good soul he invites her in to get dry and possibly help her find whatever she’s waiting for. From the first, Lily is an odd cookie and something strange seems to be going on with her, but Jason who is almost immediately smitten seems to take a while to get around to just how odd her behavior is.
I don’t want to give things away, but the story accelerates from this point at a low burn action-adventure pace like you might find in movies like Chain Reaction or National Treasure. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it has that kind of feel of the collegiate action-adventure hero type thing for lack of a better explanation. The story moves along at a pretty good pace and I enjoyed the unveiling of the plot and the intertwining of characters and timelines. There were some things I would have liked to have seen more on. Jason’s professor is quite the interesting guy who we unwittingly meet earlier in the story. I would have liked to know more about how the professor got from Point A to Point B in his life to be in place in Jason’s life. Given the story line it seems that it would have had to be pretty complex and I would be interested in reading more about that background and how it all developed.
I can’t say that I was pleased to see how things turned out with Lily and Jason. I would have liked to have seen that wrapped up some other way, but I’m sure that’s just the romantic in me. Overall it was a good story that I’m willing to recommend to others, though I would have liked to see more at some points as I did have some unanswered questions. The epilogue was one of the best and most fascinating parts of the book. I could have read an entire book that started where the epilogue took us and followed it out through the universe with no hesitation.
I think there is another, perhaps greater, story here that Peter Cawdron hasn’t written yet and may deem fit to take us through at some point. I feel like Feedback was only a chapter in what could be a greater study of these aliens in the universe and I would very interested in reading more about them. It is like we are at the edge of something great that hasn’t quite happened yet. Needless to say, the author has captured my attention and set my imagination in gear with this story. I like a story that makes me dream about what-if’s. Feedback is a good story in itself, but it could easily turn out to be the first book in a very fascinating universe if the author is so inclined.
Picture credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The specks of light you can see are not stars, not even galaxies, they’re quasars, phenomenally energetic black holes at the center of large galaxies. They thin out toward the edges not because there’s less of them further away from us but because we are looking back billions of years to when they were less developed. 
Author TJ Hapney 