Rarely I am immediately swept up into a story. It takes time to settle into a book. I need to get an overall sense of the tone and feel of the plot before I can be drawn into the story. However, Boy in a White Room by Karl Olsberg was a completely different experience. The first paragraph had me hooked and by page three my heart was pounding. By the end of the story, I had twisted my bookmark into a series of tightly coiled knots.

The story starts with a boy in a single room. The room is bright white and completely empty. The boy doesn’t know how he got there – there are no entry or exit points. No doors, no windows, and no openings. But there is a voice. It’s a robotic voice called Alice, who is programmed to take commands. It seems that the boy has arrived in the physical equivalent of Google. The room remains blank until he asks a question, then Alice locates the information which appears on the walls on the room. He has access to all the data in the world but doesn’t know the right terms to search to figure out how he got into this room in the first place.

Slowly, he figures out how to peer into the outside world. He contacts someone beyond the room – a man who turns out to be his father. His father explains the boy is a victim of a shooting that left him so badly injured his body would never recover. In his desperation to save him, he devised a way to transfer the boy’s consciousness into a virtual world. He can live out his days existing like a character in a video game. For a time, it seems like a tolerable way to live, until strange things start happening. He keeps seeing the same person over and over. Codes appear in Latin. References to Alice in Wonderland creep into the oddest places.

Then he meets a man who tries to warn him that his father cannot be trusted. The shooting was a lie and there is something far more sinister going on. Clearly, someone is trying to send the boy a message. The boy tries to connect the clues together to figure out who’s telling the truth. Who’s the real villain – his father or this man? Why are they so eager to control his existence?

The clues keep unfolding into a deeper and more complex plot as the story goes on. What starts out as a simple question of ‘where am I?’ turns into a far more sinister question of ‘who am I?’ I promise you will not predict the mystery surrounding the white room, nor the fate of the boy.

This is an adrenaline pumping story right from the start and doesn’t slow down until the end. Readers of sci-fi novels such as The Loop and The Echo Room will love Boy in a White Room.