2011/02/14

Review: Under the Skin


Under the SkinUnder the Skin by Michel Faber

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Great premise, great set up in the first half, but everything went so very very flat in the last half. Once the well written big reveal was over, there wasn't a lot left to the story but for a sad attempt at what I think was supposed to be romance but read more like fluffy page filler. Fluffy in sci-fi/horror? No thanks. It should make a decent movie, though.



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2011/02/06

Review: Under the Bright Lights


Under the Bright LightsUnder the Bright Lights by Daniel Woodrell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The dialog is all dialect and idioms, the setting is heavy on ambiance and far too light on necessity. There's a decent story hidden under all the long winded insults and far too clever retorts, but cutting through the heavy handed noir-style makes for hard reading or fast skimming.



The best part of this book is that Woodrell got it out of his system early in his career and could go on to much, much better books.



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2011/02/03

Review: Cup of Gold


Cup of Gold (Penguin Modern Classics)Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


To be a fair critic of this book, you'd need to not know who the author was before you started the book. As a first book, it doesn't deserve to carry the literary stigma of The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men. And it is a stigma, because any reader who has read those books will go looking for at least the seed of what was to become some of the greatest writing of the 20th century, and if it's a readers first Steinbeck, they're going to be expecting to see what is so great about his work. Unfortunately for this book, it just wasn't there yet. And of course it shouldn't be, how many really good authors do their best work first? That's not to say this is bad writing, rookie Steinbeck is still better that 50% of what I've read. The theme, a young man dreams of more, believes he can obtain it through hard work, and then discovers that life isn't that simple (okay, so there's that seed of future Steinbeck) is portrayed through a fictionalized version of the life of the very real pirate/privateer Henry Morgan. There's an odd sort of realism to the book, Steinbeck's pirates do have pillage and torture, rape is alluded to, they make use of the services of prostitutes, but there's no mention of them killing anyone when they do these things. Whole Spanish ships are captured through the use of fire and canonball, but there would appear to be no casualties. That lack of finality weakens the story tremendously, <spoiler>and when Morgan does kill two members of his own crew, one that he's grown very attached to, it makes the previous omissions of mortality all the more obvious.</spoiler>



I'd go with 2 1/2 stars if I could, but I'll bump it up because a)Steinbeck and b) Pirate.



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2011/02/01

Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire


The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium, #2)The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I never would have finished this if it wasn't for the brilliant narration of Simon Vance. So much detail, so much set up and almost no pay off. This clearly is part one of a two part story. Don't expect any kind of solution or closure or anything that resembles the end of a story arc. However, if you loved the main characters of the first book, you'll love them even more this time around, because they are the same people, multiplied by a factor of 2.



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