Cliche, heavy-handed, unfulfilling.
924128
This single volume title marks Satoshi Kon's initial venture into manga. Kon was an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame) and his style is indicative of that through his character designs, backgrounds, shading and more. The similarity is uncanny. The afterward by Kon himself explains how he struggled with the weekly serialization and it definitely shows within the work in regards to its pacing.

Basically the plot is about a small seaside fishing town dealing with a company who is leading construction to make the town a potential vacation hotspot for tourists. The nature-loving locals are unhappy with the city-folk coming into their neighborhood. The main conflict is how the construction disrupts a tradition within the protagonist's family about protecting an alleged mermaid's egg in exchange for an abundance of fish and safe waters. The Evil Businessman cares not for the family's traditions and just wants that Cash Money. This portrayal is cartoonish and laughable to the point that he wears sunglasses literally everywhere (until he realizes his wrongdoings and suddenly loses the sunglasses).

The characters are a very cliche. A rambunctious best friend and a girl who's become disconnected from her home town and nature. The protagonist is a disaffected youth who's trying to find his path; he doesn't have much ambition and is rather boring.

The majority of the manga is spent wondering whether mermaids are real or not and painting the land developers to be evil. The pacing suffers immensely after about the halfway point. A gratuitous car chase scene culminates into a sudden climax which left me feeling very empty.

Overall, Tropic of the Sea is an unfulfilling story with a heavy-handed "be good to nature" message and how we shouldn't mess with powers beyond our comprehension. It's a theme we've seen done much better in works like Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, and Mushishi. But this is an example of egregious moralizing to an eye-rolling extent.

The art can be beautiful and atmospheric (as shown in opening pages), but the story is basically a petty disagreement stretched over 200 pages. The conflict, characters, plot and its empty conclusion left me very unsatisfied.
4385624
This book is a classic example of a good short story stretched into a bad novel. There are some fine ideas, but way too many arduously drawn-out sequences featuring the same bland exposition of New England winter scenery, or repetitive internal monologues of every characters gnawing doubts. What could have been a great and brief experience grows tiresome when the same horror tricks and imagery keep repeating themselves in a limp loop.

The author is definitely trying too hard on style here. His prose reaches for elegance and sophistication with plenty o big words and tricky syntax. But the end result is a clunky read that often takes an extra second or reread to understand its muddled intents. The timing and pace is often off as moments read too quickly or too slowly, yet rarely smoothly and fluidly. Likewise, numerous jabs at thematic depth are awkwardly shoehorned in through simplistic ramblings of family dysfunction or Japanese folklore, none of which are so smart, interesting or engaging.

Also, a dirty man should not be called a monster. Behold this ferocious monster, this wild beast! With its man-like face, upright posture, beard, and ten fingers on two hands, it is indeed a gruesome monster! While I made that excerpt up, the gist of it runs through the book, and is not good writing. I was surprised to see this wasn't the authors first book given the high level of amateurish clumsiness in the words and plotting.

The ending makes up for a bit of the novels weakness, as it is indeed quite strong. While the meandering plot doesnt fully reinforce and support the shocking conclusion, it is still fun and unexpected nonetheless.

Its telling how this author feels like a big twist towards the finale is supposed to blow readers minds, yet the trick is heavily telegraphed throughout, starting with the very title of the book! If youve read the title, then you're already 90% through the story.
378608
Cliche filled, redundant, predictable, repetitive.  Replaces style with gruesome violence, wooden prose, cartoon characters and more violence.  Did I mention violence? Graphic descriptions of torture repeated over and over is not substance- here it's just filler and repugnant and lazy.
4836820
Both the author and the editors are to blame for the flaws of this book, which starts out pretty well, but grinds down to a slow, agonizing pace after the half way mark. The author (as she does in some of her other works, such as THE LIKENESS) insists on including tiresome, tedious dialogues that could easily be cut in half (the editor is also to blame for that.) Discussions between the 2 cops, between Kennedy and one of the victims, and between Kennedy and his crazy sister are faaaaaaaaar too long, do not do much to advance the plot, and TELL too much and SHOW too little. Part of the plot (which I won't spoil) is too implausible (the phantom animal, etc.), even for this genre, and why no one accused of a triple murder gets a solicitor when talking to the cops is beyond plausibility! Also author violates a tenet of good fiction writing by making too many characters stock and not originalhard nosed demanding chief of murder squad; malicious, conniving fellow detective out to get Kennedy; adversarial coroner, etc.
4275093
I really wanted to read this book for its subject, but every sentence is painfully clunky. Was there an editor? When I read the part about Einstein and Goedel, I felt as if the author had plagiarized Wikepedia, which is where I had already read those stories when I was reading "Goedel, Escher, Bach." Some reviewers here seem a little intimidated by this author's so-called erudition. Don't be. Reading this book reminds me of the charlatan author in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead. " That guy had written a book called "Sermons in Stone,"  and everybody was intimidated, because they thought he was an expert. I feel sorry for the reviewer who spent 3 1/2 weeks reading this awful thing. The author wrote a piece in the New York Times recently, complaining about being called Bangladeshi instead of British. It made me remember Seamus Heaney being all pissed off because he was identified in anthologies as British rather than Irish. Three and a half weeks would be much better spent reading Vikram Seth's " A Suitable Boy" and Michael Lewis's " The Big Short." Throw in James A Michener's "Caravans."
327329
Loving Day starts out promisingly but quickly devolves into an overwrought melodrama that is as unaffecting as it is clunkily written. Warren Duffy is the proverbial prodigal son who returns to his childhood home in Germantown, Philadelphia, to do right by his inheritance. At the same time that he debates what to do about the mansion-like but "crackhead"-infested house his father left him, Warren discovers that a daughter he had fathered with a long-ago (but now deceased) girlfriend is in need of his parental support. So goes the intergenerational dynamic that lies at the heart of this novel.

I actively disliked reading Loving Day because its tone is just all over the place, as though Mat Johnson, the author, had lost control of the narrative voice he wished to convey and left it at that. Warren is a thoroughly unlikeable character, and while I understand that alone doesn't disqualify the novel's success, I find his blinkered unselfconsciousness to be at odds with the book's message. There's little to no reason to care about Warren's rocky love life or his paternal inheritance (in both senses of the term) because his character barely rises above the level of an embittered manchild. So when the story itself tries to get us to care about his falling in love with another character or trying to relate to his daughter, I find Warren's first-person voice to be grating, unreflective, and just unrelatable.

A similar tonal mismatch led me to reject the novel's eagerness to depict mixed-race/biracial issues in contemporary America. Warren is fair-skinned but self-identifies as African American. The bulk of the narrative concerns his working for/against a Philadelphia charter school called Melange, which seeks to help students come to terms with their mixed-race identities. This all sounds good in the abstract, but Warren is justly suspicious of Melange's intentions from the outset: after all, there is a kind of narcissism embedded in the school's belief that it transcends the "white/black" binary of conventional U.S. race relations. Paul Beatty made fun of this kind of kumbaya "Eracism" in his 1996 novel The White Boy Shuffle. The thing is, although Warren gives voice to such critique, the story itself actually wants us to believe in the promise of Melange's mission -- even going so far as to include a scene where two ghosts, a black man and a white woman (called the "First Couple"), mate in front of Warren's daughter and become Melange's unofficial mascots. This is no joke: Johnson really invests in the power of this image, even if Warren isn't a believer until the very end. I, however, wasn't impressed. The device is cheap, and it stands in for the novel's surprisingly mushy/PC-driven racial politics.

I've enjoyed reading Johnson's other works on mixed-race/biracial identity, particularly his 2008 graphic novel Incognegro. Loving Day is a sad fall from the heights of that wonderful book.
1247222
Frustratingly cliche, one dimensional characters, and I can't even believe there's a sequel. Seriously, don't get this. I'll edit this review with full details, but right now it's almost 1 am and I'm just angry.
551285
A dull, tedious, melodramatic effort that wastes the cast and the craft of scene setting.  Everything goes out the window once people start moving and talking and it takes hours for the story to reach the predictable non-conclusion.  The film is laden with cliches and burdened by a lack of focus.  Pick a story out of here and you can make 20 films, but don't throw together teasers and expect everyone to appreciate the slow-mo trainwreck of family tragedies that this movie encompasses.
2675771
Cliched fluff with thin plot and too much emphasis on characters' sex lives, and use of language too modern for the period.  Disappointing.
4579526
Unforgivable cliches and an obvious attempt to write a book that would easily, very easily, be adapted for film.

As soon as she described the museum curator around page 50 as wearing a bow tie and tweed jacket I knew this book was meant for baby boomers with no sense of risk or realism in reading.

Don't let the Pulitzer fool you like the Academy Awards do for poor films, this book is a waste of time. Read something by Elena Ferrante instead.
4969915
What a poorly written book.  It is cliche ridden with a last chapter that is totally ridiculous.  Finally, the author writes as if she is being paid by the quantity of words, not the quality.  There are large stretches of the book where one can read just the first sentence of the paragraph and not miss a beat.
1108406
The writing is clunky and boring. The main male character has few redeeming qualities. The resolution of some of the problems is too simple.
2066396
I finally made it to the end of this book out of respect for the author's effort.  It is a rather silly treatment of some potentially powerful ideas, with trite language out of character for a woman with Kit's education, experience and social privilege; stiff, see-through characters that I never felt connected to; too many secret letters; far too many improbable and confusing coincidences, etc.  Kit was not particularly lovable or believable (eye roll when she singlehandedly killed three bad guys with her karate, one at a time while each politely waited his turn, even though armed).  My serious attempt to appreciate this story was dampened early on by the mental image of Kit whizzing through space and time in her covered wagon loaded to the gills with medical supplies, modern weapons & ammo, Apple products, etc., and of course the horse, dog & cat.  It was irrevocably thwarted when she later used her iPhone to research medical procedures--in the nineteenth century, after several days on the Oregon trail.  Sorry.  Too weird.
2405511
Cliche piled upon cliche. Repeat. Candied nostalgia and canned uplift make this "feel good" folderol a wee insulting. Did I mention it's not very good?
3279979
Praise you see for this book in reviews reflects the reverence people have for the subject matter and not the writing. If they were, in fact, addressing the author and her style, you'd see more words like "trite," "superficial" and "untalented." I had to check the "About the Author" section multiple times, just to make sure I wasn't being forced to read the self-published manuscript of a graduate student.

For everyone who read The Jungle and towards the end grew exasperated by unnecessary twist after unfeasible twist, this book will seem familiar. At least Sinclair had an excuse--he was writing a weekly feature in a newspaper. Revoyr, on the otherhand, has not justification for what can only be describe as mediocre writing. Okay, the main character is both a law student, a lesbian, asian, in a faltering relationship, estranged from her parents, her grandfather died, and she's investigating the 50 year old murders of 4 black teenagers. Her grandfather was the only Asian in LA who liked black people, and he was sent to an internment camp, and he served in WWII, and his store was torched twice by rioters, and he was an email aficionado in 1994. Are you serious? That's only to two characters--let us not forget her bisexual bi-racial friend, her aunt who rejects the institution of marriage, the man who Jesus told to pick up bowling, a boy's father who killed 8 of his comrades in Korea without repercussion, and score of other entirely other implausible characters.

This book is a joke--and that is sad considering what a serious topic it is. I literally cringed with the turning of each new page, fearful of the lunacy I knew awaited me. It's like Revoyr threw in every possible cliched, and extreme character trait she could think of, and then an editor told her "why not shoot for the moon and make them all gay?"

And of course, it is all epitomized by the cover. It's a photograph of an old store front, with the title photoshopped in from WordArt. Like everything else in this book, we find big plans and little effort with a grand finale of poor results.
2852973
Writing style lacks any luster. In too many parts, it's a regurgitation of facts and techniques that reminded me of someone's notes from a survivalist seminar, rather than story color. And it gets too bogged down in detail in places. I have made butter, have canned, and have quilted. They are tedious, exact  processes. There are ways to get that across to those who haven't experienced them, without boring passages. And the recitation of all the sterile procedures involved in removing the bullet nearly put me to sleep. It also reads like a newspaper article. She did this, then she did that, then she did . . . .
The characters were shallow, and most had no faults at all. Emma, in particular, was too over the top. She was Jack-of-all-trades and master of all. Too unbelievable. The romance, as well as the story line, was predictable and dripping with unnecessary melodrama. It read like teen fiction.
I get that when the worst happens, there will be an "us vs them" mentality. But I had a hard time with the mindset that led to not offering a meal to an obviously desperate couple because then "they will know we have food". And yet, it was OK previously to take in 4 stranded Civil Air Patrol strangers.
Everything in this book went too swimmingly well. With all the detailed house sweeping that went on, I would have expected an intruder at least once. Or maybe just one cantankerous town resident to add some reality? How about a dose of good ol' human conflict? All kumbaya, and no action makes a dull book.
3954235
This book disrespects the time and effort of everyone who reads it. The writing is horribly cliched; every sentence is a forced metaphor or a string of awkward adjectives. It seems like the author didn't have any engine for a rich or complex story, so almost the entirety of the text is descriptive nonsense. The character development, what little of it there is, is forced through weird breaks in the narration. The unsubtle relationships are plainly stated, and they are theatrically cheesy; in a similar way, the sparse dialogue is inconsistent with the characters, and the prose is purely masturbatory. There are a lot of mediocre and unpopular books out there, but very few for which the author is so thoroughly convinced of his own genius that he would dare flood college campuses with his book, as if it is some sort of undiscovered gem. My dormitory floor reads chapters out loud for comedic effect; in a floor full of engineering students, not one of us could fail to write a better novel. I am saddened by the thought that paper is used to print this book.
Try your hardest not to read this book, unless you can afford the time cost of reading it ironically for humor. Even then.