Review: Virgo 97 by Italo Marago

Published: October 2016

Pages: 129

Synopsis: “A French reporter mysteriously disappears in Russia.

Two brothers sneak into a cutting-edge research facility in San Jose to score the heist of their lives.

It's 2024 and life on Earth is about to come to its end. Einstein had predicted it: bee extinction, plant infertility, and consequent human decimation.

All this is now a reality.

Only the astronauts on Virgo 97 stand between humanity and the Apocalypse. The four brave men are supposed to save the World, but things on the spacecraft are unexpectedly taking a turn for the worse.

Sergeant Voclain will try his best to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

But time is running out...”

Rating: ****

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I received a free copy of Virgo 97 in exchange for an honest review.

Virgo 97 was a fast paced read, reminiscent of the Cold War Space Race - Russia against the UK and Great Britain to have control over colonising Mars. But with a modern twist including neuro-terrorism. Dare I say, Bond-esque?

There were 4 different strands to Virgo 97; the astronauts, ground control, the French police and the French journalist. All these strands fitted together brilliantly and the revelations that linked them all together were paced well and appropriately.

Virgo 97 was very well written. Being slightly ignorant and going by the author’s surname, I wondered if this had originally been writing in Italian and then translated into English. I queried this with the author and discovered that he is indeed Italian, but wrote Virgo 97 in English first and then translated back to Italian. This shows such an amazing command of a language that isn’t your mother tongue and I was genuinely so impressed. Not only is Italo Marago an incredibly competent writer, but to be such in a second language shows even more skill and control. There were a few incidences where the wrong tense was used in the middle of a sentence, but this only happened on a handful of occasions and would be removed with a final edit.

There was a great twist at the end, which I hadn't seen coming. A well-balanced mixture of character and plot driven with the scenes in the spacecraft being more character based as I felt those were the characters the reader got to know the best. The rest of the book was more plot based as this was where the majority of the action scenes took place and I felt you didn't get as much of a chance to know the characters. Virgo 97 wasn't too long a book, which meant it would appeal to younger readers as well as older, and the science/technology aspects were explained well and in a way that readers with no prior knowledge or expertise would understand and appreciate.

I am going to label this as a book my Granddad would like, and that is by no means derogatory as my Granddad is very hard to please when it comes to books. But I really feel that this book would appeal to those of that generation who remember the original Space Race and who would appreciate the modern twist.

I enjoyed Virgo 97 and would definitely read more by this author.