Aaron K

Suspenseful page-turner!

Revisado: 08-13-22

This book is a suspenseful page-turner and so engaging I was sad when it ended. The author’s writing is so illustrative that each scene she describes is visible and fresh in one’s mind - like a movie. I love it and recommend.

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Dont Believe The Hype ;(

Revisado: 01-10-22

Wow, this book is profoundly OVERRATED.

Moderate Spoilers - I will not ruin this lame book for you, but might reveal a few elements from this sad underwhelming book.

PROS: Fun thought experiments about the uncertainty of existence + fun to reflect on how one would engage their doppelgänger

CONS: So many...

- THE MOST INFURIATING THING - The narrator kept pronouncing Boeing as Boing... Ugh, this one got to me. Other wise the narrator was great, a little mixing on his French and African accents, but still a nice performance.

- UNORIGINAL - There is a mediocre Netflix series called Manifest and this book poorly rips off the theme of the show Manifest, Same plot with minor differences, e.g. a plane flies into a sudden terrible thunderstorm storm and unbeknown to the passengers flies into a wormhole / gets lost in time, the plane emerges years later and the surviving passengers have to make sense of the situation and deal with societies uncertainty towards them as well as gov / deep state cronies. Manifest debuted in 2018 so it must have been written or concocted in 2017 or 2016. The book The Anomaly was first published in 2018, two years after the show debuted. This did not turn me off, but I was disappointed at the sophomoric execution and overly simplistic elements of the book.

- The book cruely opens with the superfluously vivid suffering a poor dying dog. Truly unnecessary and depraved to dive so deeply in the slow torment of a dying animal. The gory scene depicting the languishing creature is purely gratuitous and asynchronistic with the rest of the book. My life is forever diminished by the first three minutes of the book

- The most interesting character is a psychopath named Blake, a clever hitman who methodically and brilliantly deploys his craft. . Blake is the character who was transfixed by the suffering of the dying dog. After this gratuitous scene, the author develops him into an interesting hitman. Dont get too interested, because you only see him three of four times again in small parts. His character is sidelined by less interesting and forgettable characters

- The other characters include an annoying, unlikeable, female video editor with zero redeeming arch, A powerful, older, stately career architect who turns into a worm of a man for the selfish video editor. A sullen translator who kills himself and is the genesis for an underwhelming driving force a book called The Anomaly. How do we know the book the Anomaly is a driving force? Because the author says so. All the tidbits are lame faux intellectualism. I imagine the author mirrored this character after himself, a man misunderstood, too smart for his contemporaries and people only realized how amazing he was after he was dead and gone, BUT the super awesome, unappreciated writer comes back to life and everyone gets to really fellate him this time. Eye roll.

The other characters = unmemorable, lame put-upon people. And a little abused girl.

- The book has a sophomoric feel because 1) the U.S. government, according to this book, has this weird daddy complex where everyone gets, a new id (that part is believable), money for a new life and resources with fake degrees from prestigious institutions. The gov is just super invested in the wellfare of everyone, including foreign nationals. Sorry but that is not how the U.S. rolls. 2) everything gets wrapped up nicely in the end

- Piss poor attempt at world building. In the Anomaly, a reality shattering global phenomenon publicly unfolds, but it is ultimately a collective yawn and shoulder shrug but the entire world community (aside from a few religious zealots, but that does not take much imagination to contrive a superstitious nut job willing to commit violence for scripture)

- The program 42 that the gov initiated to deal with the anomaly is oddly canceled in the end, not sure why because it was actually very successful and did exactly what it was supposed to do. The president of the U.S., in the book, is supposed to be a mirror of the bellicose and dimwitted Donnie Trump (the book failed because it did not represent him dumb enough, lol). Anyway, the president decides to deal with future plane appearances in a more grim, and decisive capacity. That does not mean the program 42 should be terminated, what about other similar occurrences, e.g. a ghost train, an anomalous trolly, a phantom cruise ship, etc.

CONCLUSION: For amazing fiction and world building - Claire North's First Fifteen lives of Harry August and The Games House, and Touch are awesome. So creative and unique.

I will not apologize for the length of this review or grammatical errors. You are welcome. Hope I saved one or two from getting this book

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esto le resultó útil a 15 personas

Meh

Revisado: 04-09-21

Protagonist is an uninspiring,hack,cliche, archetype. Story is written for people with brain damage. So this one is for you if you have CTE or a maga hat.

“The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” is the most exciting and creative book about time travel that I have come across.

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Meh

Revisado: 04-09-21

Protagonist is an uninspiring,hack,cliche, archetype. Story is written for people with brain damage. So this one is for you if you have CTE or a maga hat.

“The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” is the most exciting and creative book about time travel that I have come across.

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