L. Stapleton

The songs

Revisado: 10-01-24

A great combo of clever, skilled writing and great narration. Very likable, quirky characters and a well constructed storyline that leans on current events.

The main character, Gretch, is hilarious. I like her non-stop chatter and the ridiculous relationship she build with the FBI agent she works for.

The book would still have been great even without the hilarious OP boy band songs, but they really made me laugh.

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Entertaining, well crafted, but casually sexist

Revisado: 02-01-23

I generally enjoy Dennis Taylor’s novels - at least the first ones in a series. I suspect that like with the Bobiverse books, this series will become boring after a couple of books. That aside, this review is for only the first book in the series…

For a book based on a rather unbelievable premise, this is a well-crafted story. The characters face believable challenges and act in a way that grad student might typically behave, if they were very mature. However, I was disappointed in the author’s female characters. I think he makes a superficial attempt to have strong female characters, but falls into the old pitfalls when creating them. The zoologist, Monica, has an aggressive personality and is knowledgeable about guns only because she had a bunch of brothers. The group of four students who develop the portal are all male and women are brought into the project only via a boyfriend. Each time one of the female characters has a good idea, a male character says or thinks “actually, that’s not a bad idea”. Every. Time.

In general, the characters are a bit one-dimensional. Each gets a characteristic: MMA guy, nerd, guy who was bullied, hot, aggressive girl, poor scholarship student, etc. it’s a good start at character building, but they don’t get any more developed than that.

These criticisms aside, I enjoyed the book. Taylor clearly did his research on the Pleistocene environment and that makes it more readable. I’d like to see more like-able characters with realistic personalities and the female characters need to be normal people who have normal conversations with each other. Like the male characters do.

I’ll probably listen to the next book and will hopefully enjoy it as well.

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Disorganized, messy conclusion (spoilers)

Revisado: 01-13-20

My expectations for Anna Jacobs novels aren't terribly high. She writes formulaic, escapist books and that's what I read (or listen to) them for.

This final novel in the Rivenshaw series, however, is such a mess that I had to review it. The first three volumes move along predictably and are satisfying. Unfortunately, in the final book Jacobs does nothing to resolve the subplot lines she opens in the first three. The building company never builds anything. The people that Maynard Isher promises jobs to never get them. Isher gets to keep his house, which is nice, but does the building company go ahead with building houses in the rest of the land? Is the company successful? The planning commission trying to steal his land plot could easily have been a building company scam plot or something similar that would have allowed the entire storyline to be concluded.

Rather than introducing a new bad-guy character and plot, Jacobs should have dedicated this final novel in the series to establishing the building company and therefore, the futures of all the characters in the stories.

Very disappointing.

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Chick **it

Revisado: 10-04-17

This book just wasn't what I was expecting. It is described as a voyage of self-discovery in the face of a fatal cancer diagnosis, and maybe it is that. But the delivery of that story resembles "The Nanny Diaries" or perhaps "The Devil Wears Prada". The heroine is faced with her diagnosis on the same day her husband defects (trying not to spoiler here). Her reaction to everything is annoying, childish, and trite. The reader exacerbates this with her nasally, immature-sounding reading, which is more like the voice of a 20-something than a 30-something. I couldn't take this book seriously, except to be seriously annoyed.

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Stunningly idiotic

Revisado: 02-13-17

I bought this audiobook because of the high ratings and because two very intellegent people I work with read it. I failed to find out what they thought of it before I bought it. My mistake.

During the first two chapters, I was convinced that I was hearing an ironically ridiculous spy story within a story and that eventually it would become clear that those chapters were a joke. Sadly, this was not the case. Some of the highlights of those two chapters were: a man in his early 30s showing up at bloody crime site. He is brilliant (of course) and intuitively determines that the murderer is a woman. He bases this conclusion on the fact that the room is tidy, the milk is in the fridge but beer is on the counter, and that there are rom-com movies. Really? This would indicate, to me, that the killer was British because no one else in the world likes warm beer, even women. And do people who commit premeditated, very bloody murders sit around in their hotel rooms watching rom-com's? Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer did...We are also treated to the main characters purient thoughts on the murder and to other speculation about how the female victim was having sex when murdered. It's a bit much.

We soon learn that the brilliant young man authored a book on crime and espionage and that this murderer is using his book as a how-to guide. He is terribly surprised at the idea that criminals might read his book and get new ideas. Apparently, he's not as bright as we were lead to believe.

Over the course of the book we are expected to come to terms with the idea that the main character is the most interesting man in the world. At age 35ish. The female characters are either mommy figures or they want to sleep with the main character. The woman who recruited him out of college, for example, was wearing a surprisingly short skirt and had great legs.

At best, the book may be a throw back to the great age of Cold War spy novels, James Bond, Smiley, and Gorky Park. At worst it's a ridiculous pack of mysoginistic shite that you shouldn't waste your time with. I'm returning it.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Is that an Australian accent?

Revisado: 12-01-16

I believe that this narrator is British, but the cockney (?) accents she gives the characters sounds completely Australian. I found this very distracting. I also found her reading somewhat muddled between the voices and the accent and the rather dull first chapter.

With regard to the story, I read the first novel in this series and loved it, but this seems to plod and I wasn't sold on the character development, at least not when read by someone else.

I will probably read this one and return the audio book.

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Only made it though about an hour of the audiobook

Revisado: 05-18-16

The narrator was simply terrible. Flat, monotone, strange stilted pronunciations. I couldn't keep my mind on the story and gave up 1 hour in. I will be returning this one.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

fun and enjoyable

Revisado: 11-23-15

I wasn't sure I would like this when I began to listen to it. I'm pretty over the vampire genre and I don't much care for short stories. These stories, however, build upon one another like journal entries. The main character's humble humor is fun and silly. I really liked the pace and the fact that I could stop and start listening without having to think much about it. Having said that, I was always interested enough to start listening again.

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Good, but not his best

Revisado: 11-23-15

Make no mistake, this is a YA novel, which is something I didn't realize when I bought it. It is also very clearly the start of a series and feels somewhat incomplete. Having said that, it is a well-written story in a richly imagined world - as you would expect from Jim Butcher. Unfortunately, it lacks the dark humor of the Dresden files and the talking cats really are annoying (yes,we get it, humans are dumb and cats are far superior).

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Cute but nothing more

Revisado: 11-23-15

I bought this audible book on sale so I was prepared to take a chance. It started off pretty well, with a clueless heroine and a OCD villain. However, as the two characters develop,we learn that the heroine is a 25 year old virgin, and this becomes a central aspect of the plot and her personality. The virginity trope has been done to death. Is it really worthy of so much attention? Well, there isn't much else going on in this book, so I guess that's why we hear so much about it. It also becomes clear by about the 4th hour of the book that the heroine has the personality of a 12 year old. By hour 5, I had had enough of the Bond-like supervillians, killers with hearts of gold, and passive child-women. On the up side, the ridiculous psuedo-quotes from imaginary bodice-ripper novels that start each chapter were clever and amusing. Unfortunately, I was able to listen to only half before I gave it up.

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