"Saxon Algebra 1/2: An Incremental Development (Third Edition)" by John H. Saxon, Jr.

This is either a very intricately plotted book or an utter mess of one--seriously, that cover is highly representative of the plotting. Did you know the Egyptians had a secret number? I didn't. It's not even important to the plot, except as a very minor vestigial subplot where a couple of the characters keep trying to deduce it from its relationship with other numbers.

Robin Hood and his 140 Merry Men show up occasionally, though never for long, and make me question the otherwise modern setting this book seems to have. The narration is weirdly insistent that there are 140 of these Merry Men, and I'm not sure what they're doing here.

There's a rotating cast of idiosyncratically named characters that seem to be obsessed with driving away from each other in cars. And occasionally driving toward each other in cars. Some of them will also pair up and do math problems, which at least one invariably gets wrong. They also undertake a surprising number of building and home improvement projects.

 

I kept finding parts that made me think it was trying to be a realistic commercial and business-running drama, what with the lists of people buying and selling things for specific prices. Except it never tells you much about them aside from what they bought or sold for how much money. Those might have been included by mistake? Or maybe a remnant of an earlier plot? Or possibly another vestigial subplot; there are a lot of those.

And don't even get me started on the people who roll dice and take randomly colored marbles out of urns. Why do they have so many dice and urns of marbles? Is it a cult? Is it related to the mysterious character known only as "X" that the narration repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to insist the reader find him? Is it a cult of X? 

On that note, there's also, occasionally, "Y". She (it's never specified as a she and I know the y-chromosome is actually for guys, but "Y" still gives off girl vibes don't ask me how) anyway where was I? Oh yes. She seems to have some connection to X, possibly an attempt to impersonate and kill him (or, as the narration insistently terms it, "substitution and elimination"). Although I'm not entirely sure who's doing the impersonation and murder here.

Those two also have some bizarre relationship with two other people named "M" and "B", involving cars driving up and down hills. Still not sure what that's about. There may also be an indeterminate number of clones of all four, because they occasionally make two different hills at the same time, and at times a careful reading of the text would suggest that more than one of X is actually present at a time. ("Y" does that too, though less often.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being labyrinthine and strange. It would be even more incomprehensible as a videogame.

2 stars. I don't know what the heck this book is on.

(Endnote: Did I mention the book also has a bizarrely large amount of random mathematical diatribes sprinkled throughout the whole thing? It feels weirdly like it's almost trying to teach me math.)

(Endnote Squared: This was immensely fun to write.)