Timothy

Oh come on…

Revisado: 02-06-25

“And then an alien landed with his flying saucer and brought Jesus with him and Jesus stepped out and fixed everything.” That is NOT the twist in this silly story but it might as well be. Ludicrously over-constructed, mawkishly sentimental, with characters as sympathetic and convincing as Playmobil figures. It was clearly written in great haste, with sloppy phrasing all over the place. At times I suspected it was written by ChatGPT.

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Not her best, still outstanding

Revisado: 12-01-24

Rating a Tana French book is always misleading because she’s so much better than pretty much anyone else writing in the genre today. A four-star Tana French would be a nine-star taking the general standards of thriller-writing today into account in terms of prose quality, characterization and pretty much anything else that matters. Rating her books is always on her scale, not on the general scale.

That being said, this one didn’t quite work. For starters: Too many girls who aren’t different enough from each other to be able to keep track of them until the book is almost over. And the long passages where we’re supposed to be getting to know them are a little too much Finnegan’s Wake and a little too little additional story, whether plot background or parallel tangent, there’s just not the substance there to keep focused on.

Apart from thst it’s still a very good read and I never once considered not finishing it.

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Problems with credibility

Revisado: 11-11-24

Sarah Denzil is usually a good, entertaining listen but this one was significantly below standard. It reads like a pot boiler written for what the author imagines an audience of Daily Mail and Mirror readers might like rather than something she cares about herself. Also, unless you still believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, you may have serious problems suspending your disbelief. Large parts of the storyline make about as much sense as the final episodes of Lost, and in Lost the dialog was at least good to the end. Not Sarah Denzil’s finest moment.

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Exceptional

Revisado: 06-18-24

Tana French writes exceptional literary thrillers with psyhological depth and real, three-dimensional characters. As to the reviews calling the book long-winded or slow-moving: That only applies if you have a TikTok-level attention span. Every sentence is there for a reason and adds to the story, setting and characters.

The narration is also wonderful. I can’t say how accurate all the Irish accents are, but I enjoyed them immensely and they really made the people come to life.

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The series is way better

Revisado: 04-26-24

This is another example of a mediocre book that got transformed into something special when it was made into a movie or series. The Killing Eve series with
Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in the main roles is a classic masterpiece. This book, not so much. The prose is pedestrian, the characterization flat, and the author delivers interminable tell tell tell with very little show.

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Stunningly good time travel book

Revisado: 04-25-24

This book should have won the Hugo, Nebula and Booker prizes. It’s both hard SciFi with intelligent, credible science and an outstanding literary novel with deep, credible characters, wonderful poetic descriptions and a moving story.

The takes on time travel, virtual reality and digitized consciousness are novel, well thought out and thought provoking, credibly tackilng most of the difficult issues that most authors either skip over or dismiss with a wave of the hand. The only place where the author’s both hands are waving are with his creative solution to the grandfather paradox, but it serves the story so well that it’s easy to accept.

This was one of the books that made me sad it was over. Highly, highly recommended.

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Brilliant but poor ending

Revisado: 02-22-24

This is a master class in psychological thriller writing, and despite two massive defects it still deserves 5 stars. The defects: 1) There is a hole in the plot so big that you could fly a jumbo jet through it. 2) The ending and solution are so rushed and unbelievable that the whole thing ends with a dull thud. This is all the more disappointing since everything was already in place for a much better solution with a much better twist. This ending just made me say, “Oh come ON. Pull the other one.”

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Clever but a stretch

Revisado: 02-18-24

This is a clever story but prepare to have your willingness to suspend disbelief stretched really hard, and harder as it progresses towards its goofy end. Also, it only needed about one tenth of the first person unbelievably annoying teenager pages to establish that character as an unbelievably annoying teenager. After that it really just gets unbelievably annoying.

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Outstanding, brilliantly constructed

Revisado: 01-31-24

It is an unusually good psychological thriller and an instant favorite — I’m already looking forward to more by this author. It’s meticulously constructed with clever shifts between the perspectives of the main protagonists, building up a clearer and clearer image of the complex narrative. All the characters are clear and believable without going overboard into unnecessary characterization.

The narration is also unusually good — perfect voices and accents on both sides of the Atlantic, neither too much emotion nor too little.

I wish I could give more than 5 stars for this one. 😎

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Vapid, shallow, stultifying

Revisado: 01-27-24

This is a valid, shallow book about vapid, shallow people doing vapid, shallow things. The writing is exrecrable, like a junior school journal. I’m never going to find out how it ends and I really don’t care. Life is too short to waste on this kind of garbage.

The real mystery is how this book even got published. How does an agent or a publisher look at this manuscript and think, “Yes!”?

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