Tag: book review

Robopocalypse — review

Robopocalypse

The premise of this novel intrigued me, and the fact that it was written by a person with a doctorate in robotics made it too good to pass up. I bought my Kobo edition and read it over the course of a few days.

The premise is awesome. The robots, the war and all that — great. But this read like an early draft. The author structured the novel as a series of reports and I believe he did this because he didn’t give himself enough time to actually write the novel with developed characters, a fully-fleshed-out story line or overall story arc. The characters were all somewhat robotic and distanced. This may have been intentional, but it was off-putting. The biggest disappointment was that the report-structure completely deflated the tension in a story that had all the makings of a page turner.

I suspect the early interest of Dreamworks put the author on such a tight deadline that the novel suffered. As a screenplay this works. As a novel? Not so much.

Having said that, it will still appeal to reluctant male teen readers. The report style is like a series of bang-em up/shoot-em up short stories.

Shadow — review

ShadowShadow by Karin Alvtegen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Such a dark novel.

How does the death of an old woman connect to a child abandoned in an amusement park decades ago? And how will their connection ruin an elderly Nobel prize winning author’s family and reputation?

I love this author’s ability to take the reader inside each character’s head. Seeing the outer actions versus the inner thoughts is so compelling. Seeing how each person’s perspective of events collides with other realities is illuminating in itself. Makes one wonder what filters we all have up. But in the novel the mixture of all these disparate realities is what makes the grim thriller.

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Gallow’s Bird review

The Gallow's Bird (Patrik Hedström, #4)The Gallow’s Bird by Camilla Läckberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a great find! A very good novel even though I came into this series about three books in. One thing that I found a bit disconcerting is that the author has multiple points of view separated only by a double space. Once I came to expect that, it wasn’t an issue. Really good writing. Transcends the genre.

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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

I really enjoyed Larson’s The Devil In the White City so I was looking forward to this one. It started out strong but dragged about halfway through.

Ambassador Dodds was a remarkable man and it’s too bad the American government didn’t take his concerns about Hitler seriously in the early 30s. I am grateful to Larson for illuminating the life of this interesting man and his unusual family.

This is an era that I’ve studied and written about myself and I was impressed with the depth of research that Larson did in terms of the Dodds family and Berlin. He fell short when it came to historical context, however. As an example, he mentioned Dodd’s daughter’s trip to the Soviet Union and about the NKVD recruiting her. The Soviet Secret Police were every bit as brutal and racist as the Nazi Gestapo. There is no indication of that in this book. In fact, towards the end of the book, he calls Martha’s flirtation with the NKVD noble. Hardly.

As well, the author implies that Ukraine was a region in “Russia” when in fact it was a country that had been taken over by the Soviet Union — Russia is not interchangeable with the Soviet Union. I realize that many people make that mistake, but in a historian, it’s just plain sloppy.

He mentions that Ukraine had “suffered a famine” in 1933 but he states it passively, as if it were a fluke of nature, instead of what it really was — an intentional genocide of Ukrainians that killed millions. He didn’t mention how many people died but did mention the deaths of livestock. I found that odd, to say the least.

He also skipped over the fact that Stalin and Hitler were allies for the first two years of WWII, and instead jumps to when Stalin was an ally of the US. That’s not just sloppy but misleads the casual reader into thinking that Stalin was a different kind of person as Hitler.