Thomas A. Copeland

Choose with Caution

Revisado: 09-24-24

First off, this is hardly a typical Dean Koontz novel; not, that is, a serious investigation of other possible dimensions of reality and credible characters. Rather, all is distorted, exaggerated, burlesqued. It's good to see a demonstration of the author's sense of humor, and every character is vividly presented and consistently distinguished from all the others. However, the humor becomes at last tedious.

The reader remains appropriately in the background except in two respects. First is his peculiar pronunciation of many words containing the vowel beginning the word "under," which when appearing medially he pronounces instead like the "u" in "push." He also tends to stress unimportant syllables and minor words like prepositions when a minor shift in emphasis would clarify a contrast and demonstrate that he is keeping his mind on the story.

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Excruciating and Hopeful

Revisado: 11-23-23

Any fall into semivacuum would be pathetic, but a fall from so high an intellectual pinnacle is tragic. To know so much about what is gradually eroding away must hurt savagely. That Alice gets past the hurt and is surrounded by love is the only consolation.

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Don’t Listen If You Know Any Greek Names

Revisado: 12-21-22

Within the first five minutes you will hear the reader pronounce the names Simonides and Anacreon on the stress model of Conestoga. If you can stomach this butchery, read on. Mary Renault deserves better.

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Teaches Thinking

Revisado: 08-18-19

The story is exciting and highly imaginative. As long as the protagonist is dealing with emergencies and dealing with threats, she engages our sympathy, but in the slower segments, when she and her friends grapple with interpretation, trying to figure out their actual situation, her mind seems to move with glacial slowness. At first I thought her character, bright and flexible, was being violated, but then I realized that the novel is intended for adolescents with only moderate intelligence; the heroine’s achingly gradual fitting of the pieces together is meant to teach the step-by-step process of inference.

The prose is ultra-current, as would be expected with an audience of millennials. “Like” appears almost always as a conjunction. Even where “like putty” would serve, the author prefers “like it was putty,” and doubling the number of words seems to be a plus in his opinion. Pronouns appear always in the objective case except as the subjects of simple sentences—never in elliptical constructions like “She was as grateful as HE (was).” Subject-verb agreement is often violated, especially when there is a convenient predicate noun nearby with which to make the verb agree. Such habits of composition may very well endear the series to malleable young minds eager to learn how their peers talk and write.

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Dismal Review

Revisado: 07-24-19

The reader pronounces each sentence almost as if in a list of sentences. She emphasizes nothing so as to connect the ideas with their context—words such as “other” or “next”—seemingly aware of nothing more than the grammatical connections of words within the sentence rather than of semantic links throughout a paragraph. Not does she have sufficient education to be acquainted with the allusions she is obliged to read. She also pronounces “gig” “jig” all five times.

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Promising but half-baked

Revisado: 06-21-19

The author needs a better copy editor. There are far too many errors in idiom, not to mention problems in agreement (pronoun-antecedent and subject-verb), pronoun reference, and parallel structure. The heavy peppering of the dialogue with variations on the “f” word deprives the word at last of any power whatever, and the prose becomes simply verbose.

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Ideal young adult sci-fi

Revisado: 03-06-19

Adults may find the opening of this novel juvenile, but any reader can enjoy the adventures that follow. The aliens surpass expectation, and the precocious kids’ fortitude and endurance warm the heart. Their quarreling May be tedious it Heinlein’s iat times, and the mathematics may wear on one’s patience, b

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Needs an Editor

Revisado: 09-25-18

Although the plot of the novel (with the exception of the dénouement) is well handled and the romance sweet, the editing needs some work. The author commits several Malapropisms, the worst being "waylay" for "allay," and she seems to believe the presence of "and" in a phrase demands some special shift of pronoun case, no doubt because an early teacher criticized her for some non-standard utterance like "Me and Martha got caught." For this reason, she assigns the only grammatically correct phrase of this kind in the novel to a Cockney apprentice: "I came in here looking for you and him." The author apparently regards "and him" as impossible in polite speech. Her narrator, a proper clockmaker's daughter with some education, commits the following hypercorrect errors:

There’s no need for you and I to investigate together.
There was something between he and Willie. . . .
. . . but she was born into a system that didn’t . . . allow Matt and I to be anything more than employee and employer to one another.
Between he and Cyclops I felt quite safe.
Please, are you able to help my brother and I?
The fellow beside me got off, leaving Mirth and I as the only passengers on the right.

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Labored but Rewarding

Revisado: 09-19-18

The story line necessarily involves many characters who have nothing to do with the emotional core of the tale. This blurs the focus for the first half or more of the novel, which moves slowly, on a political level. However, the pace picks up eventually and the focus returns to the characters we truly care about. That there exist such characters is the only thing that sustains us through the first half. The resolution is fulfilling.

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Charlotte Brontë's last novel

Revisado: 06-20-17

Lucy Snow possesses a Romantic temperament suspected by nobody, and she herself is its strongest critic. She has no obvious prospects or merits, save her strength and honesty. But like others, she has a heart to be wounded and affections to give. And she has intelligence that illuminates every page.

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