fragmentBy Warren Fahy
Bantam Dell Books, $25.00, 353 pages

SeaLife is a reality show that chronicles a year on the ship, Trident, hoping to uncover new adventures and, if the director gets her way, a few budding romances on film as well. What they do find is beyond their wildest dreams! With an imaginative storyline, Fragment takes you to an island where the evolutionary process has developed backwards to an age of dinosauric ramifications, mimicking survival of the fittest without human intervention. Author Warren Fahy over-stimulates us with incessant evolutionary science and species classification to the point of tedium. Many parts of the story are intriguing and plausible; others leave you harlequin-starved, secretly skipping paragraphs to move things along. It takes you from edge-of-your-seat suspense to dull ramblings of an obsessed, lackluster scientist droning on and on about the differences in mantis shrimp and wasps. In the end, Fragment is a fantastic concept with endless potential, yet, sadly, unbelievable in its storybook ending.

Reviewed by M Chris Johnson