A disappointment in every way
937804
It didn't fit on my bike (an older Cannondale road bike) or even come close.  It didn't fit on my wife's road bike, her mountain bike, or my son's mountain bike either.  It must be designed for a narrow range of bikes.  The instructions are vague and incomplete.
231361
Although I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book, once it came and I started to browse through it I was immediately disappointed!  Whereas the first was thoroughly entertaining and "on the mark" as concerns what it is to be Prep, this new edition attempts to make everyone preppy, and only if they live in the northeast.

The author goes to great pains to center the universe of prepdom in the northeastern part of the USA, and virtually ignores all other regions of the country.  As someone who went to one of the preppiest colleges in Virginia (and in the entire country), I can assure Ms. Birnbach that she has totally missed the mark in this regard.  And I'm sure that Preps in other regions of the country will feel the same way upon reading this volume.

Likewise, the author seems to suggest that Preppies in the twenty-first century are all social and political liberals who worship at the altar of the current administration and its progressive, socialist, radical views of the world.  Of course, nothing could be further from the truth... and if the author ever got out of NYC she might have known this before writing this book.  But, since she did not bother to do so, she overlooks the fact that one synonym for the word "preppy" is "conservative." The first book certainly underscored this fact, but this latest volume goes far, far astray in this regard.  (Incredibly, the author devotes much time to claiming over and over again that people like the Obamas, Al Franken, and Jane Fonda are somehow prep... presumably based solely on where they went to school!  Psah!  People such as these have never been part of the prep world or abondoned it long ago!)  Perhaps Birnbach, herself, has strayed into the liberalist camp, but the real world of prepdom has not, and you would never know that from reading this book.

In similar fashion, this book constantly mentions the fact that "real" preps can all trace their heritage to the "Mayflower," thereby re-enforcing the notion that preppy is something that only exists in New England.  Such nonsense!  The author either has fogotten (or, for shame, never knew) that this country was founded in VIRGINIA seven years before the Mayflower set sail for the New World.  Again, another fact the author might have known if she took the trouble to get out of NYC and visit other bastions of the prep world, especially in the South.

And this book also makes a HUGE mistake in assuming that, somehow, being preppy also means being a WASP.  Anyone who knows and lives in the prep world also knows that the two are simply not a required equation.  Being preppy has no religious requirements (although historically it may have been that way a couple of hundred years ago), and to suggest that it does eliminates at least 50% of those are are preppy.

And one final thought and point of disagreement.  The author has attempted to make prepdom something that is "all-inclusive."  She now seems to consider just about everything as preppy, from food, to clothes, to attitudes.  This also is just another load of nonsense that completely misses the mark.

If you enjoyed the first book, then you will probably hate this one... I certainly did.  Do yourself a big favor and save your money... this new volume isn't worth it.  And its a real shame, too, since Birnbach could so easily have gotten this one right... but she didn't!

What would be truly welcome is a book written by a REAL prep... someone who can honestly chronicle what it means to be preppy in the twenty-first century.  Unfortunately, Birnbach has lost that ability!
3564983
Absent the hyperbolic praise that the book attributes to itself and the New York Times has puzzling seconded, I would have found this book a disappointment. Since I made the mistake of reading it after being assured of its brilliance, I found it maddeningly facile, judgmental, humorless, lifeless, and dull.

Characters sound the same regardless of age, gender, and purported motivation and don't have any meaningful reason to exist on the page except to suffer under their author's glare. There's a haughty condescension that seems to drip from every page. While there's a multi-character narrative in that the story is told from the perspective of differently-named but not terribly distinguishable characters, there's no real story to be driven -- multiple perspectives on an actress wearing a silly costume or kicking a cell phone hardly reach the threshold of "delv[ing] into humanity's most profound mysteries." I'd suggest that if this book is addressing life mysteries for you, you should consider consulting a therapist or science teacher.
247626
Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Flagg's previous novels, I picked up this book with high expectations.  Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! was a disappointment on almost every count.  The early parts of the book  present some memorable characters with humorous and very true insights.  And as the book drew towards a revelation of Dena's mother's secret I found  myself eager to uncover the tragedy which separated a mother from her  child.  However, the revelation was disappointing and, simply put, absurd.  After that the book trickled on to a trite ending which  totally  unsatisfactorily addressed the concerns and emotions of the characters.  Baby Girl seemed more intent on making small town folk feel good about  themselves than realistically depicting their lives and dilemmas.  Most bad  novels are only forgettable.  Unfortunately, this one will get under your  skin and irritate you for weeks.  If you liked Ms. Flagg's earlier books  and are looking for more, spare yourself the irritation and just re-read  Fried Green Tomatoes.
3167622
I would not put anyone through the misery of reading this poorly written book. A pure disappointment and let down
2368366
It's been almost a year since I've read this book, but I wanted to throw my $.02 in and say that this book is a major stinker.  In the ROLLING STONE interview with Anne Rice that came out around the time of the book's release, it was revealed that Ms. Rice wrote the novel in a span of about four weeks; anyone reading the novel will be able to know that on instinct.  Furthermore, to even call this a novel is stretching it too far.  This "book" is nothing more than the pseudo-theological ramblings of a person who has come to view her position as a writer as indestructible, and laying this work out for the general public to buy under the impression that it is another Vampire Chronicle is misleading and greedy.  The plot is barely there, the characters are boring, and the overall tone of the book was so dull that I haven't been inspired to buy or read the two books that followed this one.  If Anne Rice wanted to write a book about what she thought the afterlife would be like, she should have promoted it as nonfiction, not the fifth "Vampire Chronicle".
2827989
A big disappointment.  I was so surprised when I received this as a gift.  But after I plugged it in it was all downhill.

First of all, it kept rebooting itself when I was trying to get it hooked up to my computer.  Because of this, it took me at least a half an hour just to get all the drivers loaded.

Finally, I transferred some music, excellent, no issues.  Then I tried to do movies.

After I unsuccessfully tried to load the digital copies of The Dark Knight, Stepbrothers, Wanted, the Incredible Hulk, and Hellboy II onto the unit, I did some research and found that the Cowon does not support DRM video content.

Just to test this information out I tried other legal media outlets, and its all the same, all DRM, 0 compatibility.  So, unless I want to start pirating movies, I am out of luck here.

I sent this back the next day
2179192
I was truly disappointed by this novel. I was looking forward to reading it on two fronts. First, as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Second, as an introduction to Caleb Carr. The Sherlock Holmes story fell far short and left me not likely to read anything else by Carr.

To call the novel wordy would be an understatement. It was a full third of the way through the book before we arrive at the crime scene. While I understand that a novel with an historic base will require a fair amount of back-filling to get the reader up to snuff on the facts, the sometimes vicious banter between Holmes and his brother, Mycroft only added page upon page of useless wordiness that Carr seemed to feel necessary. Thirty pages in a hansom between the railroad station and Hollyroodhouse was a bit much, especially after fifty pages on a train.

Sadly, by the end of the novel Carr has managed to paint Mycroft as a bumbling fool, which is far from the character as presented by others.

Where Holmes typically will hold all theories on a crime to himself, often to the frustration of those closest to him, Carr's Holmes seems to take every player in the book into his confidence, leaving very little to the reader to figure out. In fact, the crime was pretty much solved and laid out with a full third of the novel left to go, leaving Carr a third of the novel to weave the most ridiculous, disconnected ending to any Holmes pastiche that I have ever read.

Without spoiling the story for anyone still inclined to bother reading it, I will share the most bizarre part of the chase scene at the climax of the story. After Watson has taken a potshot at one of the story's antagonists and has then been reassured by Holmes that he is still in pursuit, Watson rounds a corner to find Holmes sitting, tuning and playing a lute. Huh? Really? I thought I had missed something and turned back a couple of pages.

I don't know what else I can say about this travesty.

ONE STAR, BUT ONLY BECAUSE I COULDN'T GIVE IT ZERO

1 STAR
4904214
This was so disappointing.  AMS's Emma is a truly appalling heroine.  One of my favorite devices in fiction shows a moral journey in which a flawed, or even despicable hero is redeemed by the novel's end (brilliantly done by William Boyd in his A Good Man in Africa), but Emma does not undergo such a transformation.  AMS is an attorney who is an expert in medical ethics, and his interest in ethical questions underlies many of his novels.  He often has his characters ponder moral questions,  explaining his characters thoughts and motives from an omniscient 3rd person point of view.
JA excels in illustrating her characters' moral and psychological realities not by telling us, as AMS does, but by allowing dialogue and behavior to exhibit this. For example, Darcy's haughty aunt is first introduced to the Bennet girls through the pedantic, intrusive, over-sharing recollections of their cousin, Mr. Collins, who is overwhelmed at her condescension to him.  Elizabeth soon gets to experience the wonders of Lady Catherine de Burgh for herself on a visit to see her friend Charlotte Collins, nee Lucas.  In just one scene, Lady Catherine's character is painted.  As they approach Rosings for the first time, Mr Collin's reassures Elizabeth not to needlessly concern herself about her appearance, as Lady Catherine likes to see the distinctions in dress of social rank preserved.  Lady Catherine then dictates to, interrupts, and rudely pries into her guests' circumstances.  She interrupts Elizabeth's piano playing, reminds Elizabeth to practise the piano diligently, even condescending so far as to invite Elizabeth to practise on the governess' piano at Rosings, noting that her presence in "that part of the house", would be no imposition, which embarrasses Darcy.  Any time that Elizabeth is in quiet conversation with Darcy or his cousin, Lady Catherine interupts, once exclaiming that she must have her share of any conversation involving music, due to her superior taste, and notes that her daughter "would have been a great proficient musically, if she had ever learned".  Austen is an astute judge of character, even 200 years later, her characters seem as real as people one knows.
While I enjoy many of his novels (Bertie's engulfing mother is a particularly wonderfully ridiculous creation), in general, he is a genre writer.  One suspects he might well be quite capable of writing serious fiction, but is really just having fun.  But Emma fails on any level.  I kept patiently hoping it would get better.  I don't know why he bothered.
2121867
What a complete disappointment. After 10 years of teasing fans of the original movie with promises of a sequel, THIS is what we get?? BDS2 was complete schlock.

Much of BDS2 is just re-enacted scenes from the first movie, forced-in where they don't really fit. The story is a series of contrivances that undermine the story of the first movie.

The MacManus brothers are no longer presented as shepherds set on a righteous path by God.  Instead they are now born killers who cannot control the hunger to kill again, which is backed by some vague desire for personal revenge.

The MacManus brothers are in conflict with each other, but not in the same good-natured way as in the first film. This never plays out to any kind of conclusion, making it one of many things that just don't make any sense in the movie.

Some new characters:

Romeo.  Apparently the movie needed a new Rocco.  Unfortunately, what we end up with is a Jar Jar Binks character that everyone would have been much happier without.

Eunice.  She wants to be a badass lawgirl.  Instead, she comes across as a stripper who likes playing pretend cops-and-robbers.

The Roman.  The new "bad guy". This character could have been *anyone* - it really wouldn't have made any difference to the story.

Returning characters:

Detectives Geenly, Duffy, and Dolly are superfluous to the story and are there almost solely to remind the audience that this movie is supposed to have something to do with the original BDS.

Agent Smecker is briefly onscreen.  Again, this is a contrivance - put Willem Dafoe on the credits, draw in that audience...

Billy Connolly is back as Il Duce.  Unfortunately he isn't given any good dialogue and doesn't play much part in the action either.  If he had been given something to do in this movie, there would have been little need for Romeo.

So it seems that BDS2's goal was just to get fans to open up their wallets and bend over.  But if you're a fan of the first movie, you're going to (try to) watch this one anyway.
589301
Cardboard chacters, stock situations and a remarkable lack of depth make this book a real standout, in all the wrong ways, from Crusie's other work.  One example: the heroine's obligatory gay male best friend tells the hero to "take care of my girl" because she's so special.  After two days.  In fact, one day after the hero couldn't say no to sex with one of the most two-dimensional bimbettes in history. What kind of a best friend is that? And has either author ever been on a movie set???  Ohmygosh... a dreadful disappointment.  (I'd give it no stars if Amazon had that option.)
4928334
I bought this book used, and am so glad I didn't pay full retail. It does far less than fail to live up to its hype -- it is a profoundly disappointing, misogynistic and deeply misguided work.

Like many here, I read industry reviews praising the cleverness of the book, and lamenting the fact that a fairly straight-forward love story could grip the cynical reader and draw her in. I'm sorry, but it failed to do that almost immediately with me. The author's writing style is stilted, and the story-telling poor. Niffenegger creates two main characters who are both little more than thinly-disguised Mary Sues. Every supporting character is a cliche. The she takes the messy lot and throws them into a story possessing less plot than my drive home offers.

By far, the most depressing and distressing character is Clare. But she is these things not because of clever character construction. Rather, it's because of the existence the author gives her. She spends her whole life waiting for Henry. Henry is allowed a life, with other girlfriends and other experiences. Clare is his from the age of 6 onward, and she spends the years keeping him secret, feeding and clothing him, and forsaking all others. She is not allowed to develop on her own. She is groomed by an older Henry to be the woman to which a younger Henry was drawn. She never had the chance to become anything on her own.

Further, it doesn't really seem that Henry is truly more than enchanted by Clare before he travels and meets her very young self. This aspect of the story is, as one other reviewer noted, creepy. Despite the very hollow words uttered by the characters, Henry seems to come to love Clare over the course of his visits to her during her childhood and adolescence, as he molds her into the woman he wants her to become. His visits are often depicted as happening during tense periods during their married life in Clare's future, and have the distinct feel of an older man visiting his young mistress. We're somehow expected to be okay with this, though, because they are meant to be together. Because they are married, in the future. And like any good victim, Clare faithfully keeps the secret, assured that her future, and Henry's will be jeopardized if she does otherwise.

The treatment of Henry's time-travel affliction -- as a sort of seizure-type condition -- is interesting, but not enough to save the book. If you're looking for science fiction, please don't let that mischaracterization of this book dupe you. It's a stretch. While reading this, I felt over and over again that had the author not graduated from a creative writing program, this manuscript would have been rejected, and that a cleaned-up, more palatable version (read: no pedophilia)  would have graced the genre fiction shelves some day, where such things belong.
2422551
I read Insatiable and I found it a fun, engaging read with a satisfying plot.
*SPOILERS BELOW*
This book bears no resemblance. It's half the length, full of plot holes, the entire middle section is a plodding bore, & every "twist" heavily foreshadowed and predictable.
I cannot fathom why the author would build a compelling character in Lucien in the first book, only to totally discard it in favor of turning him into a reductive, self-loathing "villain" in this book.
Mary Lou, Emil, and Jon have all been turned into background characters who only show up to advance some plot or distract is from gaping flaws in the narrative.
Meena knows someone is possibly going to die by going into a house and not only does she not explicitly warn the dude, her "bad feeling" is totally written off by these two men who work with her specifically because she is able to tell when people are going to die!!
The entire book revolves around this stupid "all evil vs all good, can they be saved?" narrative, and at the end it's completely unresolved. No one is saved, or good. The vampires die, or they flee.

Worst of all, Alaric is actually even more simple than in the first book- just a meathead with communication issues he refuses to address. His relationship with Meena is the least romantic thing I've ever seen/read. They can scarcely hold a conversation and yet at the end our "brave, independent" heroine gives up her entire life and career to jet off to Antigua with a guy she's kissed exactly twice- a guy so emotionally stunted he can't tell her how he feels and so presumptuous that he assumes she showed up just to run off with him.

There is a very, very short list of follow-up novels bad enough to make me wish I'd never even read the superior original books, but this book makes that list hands down.
906160
I love the Beatles and was looking forward to this book; but it's a terrible disappointment.  It's poorly written--every cliche possible is trotted out, the same stories (mostly showing John in a bad light) are repeated many times, and its main contents are rumors not facts.  If John was really the horrible human being (never mind whether he had a miserable childhood or not, it's what he was that counts) described in this book over & over--cruel, aggressive, foul-mouthed with NO redeeming characteristics, the Beatles wouldn't have stayed together for 10 minutes let alone ten years.  More important is the real absence of an understanding of the music, what it brought to the musical scene, how it was composed and revised and performed, etc. etc.  We get every one of John's usages of the f-word and almost nothing about how he wrote or helped write the music.  Shameful.
3765874
This book was a huge disappointment, and not just for the reasons everyone is saying.  The plot, the writing, the failure of the two narrators, and yes, the ending -- they all made this book horrible.  I am very disappointed and wish I had stopped at the second book.  I hope the movie changes not only the ending but the entire story because this revelation about genetic experiments is just plain stupid.  Epic fail times ten.
2857115
Even though it was a summer reading book assigned for school, I was excited to read this after reading the enthralling reviews online. Now after reading it I can say that not only was it a huge disappointment, it was quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. Take "Jurassic Park" (another book by this author), shrink it down to the biological scale, and give it the most disappointing and least energetic ending possible. The book is loaded with meaningless outdated pseudo-science, flat characters and brief encounters with exciting events unrelated to the actual plot. It is in my opinion a bad turn in a book when characters start having seizures simply to add a lively turn to the monotony of the current sequence of events. Any thrill the reader may have for the solution to the problem itself will be firmly beaten down by the ending of this book. Since the events themselves are simply not exciting, the author's attempts to make them seem like action-movie material fail utterly.
571049
Having adored the first adult novel in this series, "Strange Visitor" by Roger Stern, I was really looking forward to Grant's "Dragon." I was, unfortunately, very disappointed.
"Dragon" is rife with continuity errors that should have been caught during the editorial process, such as Whitney "Ellsworth" showing up a few times (though he was correctly referred to as Fordman for most of the novel), and a number of British-isms that should have been excised long before the book hit shelves (At one point Nell tells everyone to go to the "lounge" rather than "living room", Chloe says "Blast!", etc.). Plot-wise, the A-plot of the novel is a redux of the first season episode "Hourglass". Lana's aunt Nell and two others were in the hit list this time, as they had testified against the Freak of the Week years earlier.
There is a Lex B-plot, as Mary Sue Ex-Girlfriend shows up on Lionel's payroll, just because Lionel wants to mess with Lex's head--literally, the explanation of why Lionel is paying this sleazy girl to try and trick Lex into giving her [one] million dollars? "Why not?" Unfortunately, the Lex subplot is just... boring. Renata is a lackluster original character, and her relationship with Lex is a sad rehash of Victoria Hardwick, with none of the spark of Carrie Castle.
The Clark/Lana subplot fares even worse, as a sweet little old lady (shades of Cassandra) is using kryptonite-laced mint tea to hypnotise Lana into dumping Whitney and going for Clark, and Clark into believing he's a normal, non-superpowered teen which leads to a pointless re-hash of Clark's anger and confusion regarding his alien heritage which was much better handled in the "Smallville" pilot. As far as the supporting characters are concerned, Chloe and Pete are there as cannon fodder for the final showdown with the Smallville dragon (both end up in the hospital, and the tension of "Will Pete live?" is of course non-existent, as we know he will.).
Fan fave Chloe Sullivan has a brief nice little bit of characterisation, regarding her favourite teacher who is killed (which unfortunately seems to simply rehash a first season Buffy episode "Teacher's Pet") and that's about it. Much of the exposition in the novel is inserted clumsily, and Chloe's inner thoughts regarding Clark--and Clark's regarding her--are clumsy and at times ludicrous (the author uses Clark's inner voice to tell the audience that Chloe has a crush on him--which makes no sense, given that Clark on the show never suspected prior to "Ryan") not to mention Pete's crush on Chloe is handled way badly. And Chloe's snark? Not in her "voice" at all.
And Whitney? That was the biggest sticking point for me--it was as if he was based entirely on the pilot, and as such, was the least consistent characterisation of them all. And it stuck out like a sore thumb. This sort of sloppy characterisation makes the reader wonder if Alan Grant or the editors had ever seen the show, past the pilot episode, or reading the script of the pilot. For a media tie-in, this is simply unacceptable, not to mention a foolish business decision, since the readers of the novel are almost guaranteed to be fans of the show, and will spot continuity and characterisation errors a mile off.
There's a smidge of good Jonathan and Martha stuff, and some lovely Nell, but not enough to justify buying the book. If you're a fan of the series, not only does this not work as a good "Smallville" novel, the disjointed weaving from A plot to B plot to C plot with little to tie the threads together makes it not a particularly satisfying novel either, in terms of structure and pacing.