Saturday, August 22, 2009

Toxin by Robin Cook (1998)

Picked this up on a lark, and mostly wish I hadn't.

The story could be good, but the pacing is horrid and the main protagonist is simply over the edge for 90% of the time. The only interesting character in the whole thing is the hitman hired from Chicago. And you'll only spend about 20 or 30 pages with him towards the end of the book.

You'll spend a lot of time page-flipping, waiting for the action to start or for motivations to make sense.

I felt like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a heroic epic, a horror book, a mystery, or a thriller. The ending was very much a muddle, with no resolution and simplistic tying up of plotlines. Ultimately, the actions of the protagonist had no effect.

Which maybe was the point of the book. In which case it comes across as nothing more then anti-industry propoganda rather then an entertaining read.

Labels: 2009, Books

posted by Wuphon's at 10:35 PM (0 comments)

Monday, November 03, 2008

Pern Series - Dragon's Dawn

So I dug back into Dragon's Dawn (Anne McCaffrey's Pern series) this week. The book is a lot shorter then I remembered, and it rushes at a head-long pace towards a pretty so-so conclusion. I think my problems with it were:

- Too hard to identify the protagonists, and then keep them straight. There were a lot of story threads going on at the same time, which made it difficult. We really needed to spend a longer time with each protagonist before the story thread jumped to yet another person.

- Pacing. Disaster piled upon disaster piled on top of yet another disaster. Which would have been a lot more interesting, had there been more pages between.

- Scattered focus. I think this goes hand-in-hand with having too many protagonists, all introduced at the same time.

I'll still probably plow ahead with the series, hopefully the author learned from her mistakes. But since Dragon's Dawn was published in 1988, at about the mid-point of the author's career, I'm not overly hopeful.

(It may simply be that I prefer the works and writing style of C. J. Cherryh or Lois McMaster Bujold.)

Labels: 2008, Books

posted by Wuphon's at 8:44 AM (0 comments)