Book Review – The God Frequency by Douglas Hemme

The book starts off well with an introduction to our main character Antwan. His character description and setting is the fun “guy in his garage” character like Matthew Broderick in WarGames. The smart kid who, by his own gumption, comes up with a discovery and invention that will revolutionize the world. The main character and his surfer friend don’t waffle throughout the book as decent characters. Where the story suffers is in the narrative of the story. It suffers from “author interest”.

The author appears to know a thing or two about HAM radio, radio frequencies, and that type of niche community where he’s clearly knowledgeable. The story goes long and wide on frequencies and radio signals and all the nomenclature, but it fails to take the audience along for the ride. Some of the fun in these types of books is learning the tech and keywords, thinking how Michael Crichton informed his readers of these new tech fields in his stories. However, you have to either have a character in the story you can explain things to, which is not here, or you have to be ok with explaining the terms and importance to your audience and hope they’re ok with reading it. I’m ok being informed as I read (although I admit I like when the explanation occurs in the story rather than to the audience) and the author fails to inform me what’s going on or even why the “God Frequency” is important or what it does or what the applications are. There is some of that but it’s not enough to capture me in the story or with what the author tries to do with the rest of the story.

The inclusion of the co-character Lauren is a good edition and there are some fun quirky character-driven moments. However, they are few and far between and what’s in between is more technical jargon and experiments I don’t understand what’s happening. Dr. Sullivan’s edition doesn’t have much relevance and he seems just to be able to get the two main characters on stage for a TED talk that goes viral. His reward in the end feels totally unearned.

Finally, the plot point, also teased in the book’s summary, is that threats emerge and chaos ensues. Not quite. There’s a very cringey and low-effort attempt made to have some religious nut send a hitman out to take out our characters because he believes calling it “The God Frequency” is blasphemous. A foreign government operation would have been more believable. And that fact that Antwan helps the government that is stealing his tech and science before a court forces the feds to turn it back over (which wouldn’t ever happen) doesn’t provide the tension that could be used here. In fact, the whole section from the government capture to the end is way too quick and not much happens even with the hitman. The final portion of the book fizzles out with the end reward. It doesn’t seem like the author wanted to let the audience know what possibilities could come about or what the new future of life with the God Frequency would result in. What the book turns out to be is really a HAM radio geek (said with all the love) wrote a fanfiction account of something that would be fun to find but only on the tech side of figuring it out but couldn’t quite develop the story surrounding it. I’m confused at what happened and why it was important. Not an awful book but limited on enjoyment.