Verbose Story Tries Hard to be Current
925341
After I was non-plussed by the new Action Comics treatment of Superman by the "DC New 52" crew, I was not excited about reading this book either.  First of all, redoing Superman well is not going to be an easy task, with all the books, movies and TV shows.  Frankly, Supes, like Madonna, is a bit over exposed.

But the story here satisfies.  It is verbose, detailed, and tries a bit too hard to be "current" with references to twitter and the decline of print media.  The story even follows the traditional "Superman fights a seemingly impossible foe and reigns victorious" arc.  But that's OK, because it's interesting enough to get us through the pages.  The villain was about as boring as could be imagined, but every other single character was compelling and interesting.

I'm not a fan of the cover- it does not do justice to the great artwork inside.  These guys got it backwards- usually comics oversell the book with an amazing cover.  In this case, what's inside is much better.
1283039
There is a decent, if somewhat conventional, rags to riches crime story here, layered under some gratuitous literary posturing. The focal character, Teresa Mendoza, keeps herself emotionally distant from everyone, including the reader, which almost surely is intentional (as the story is being told by a reporter, who pops in every now and then for some first person narrative while on the hunt for details) but handled poorly. The result is a watched pot that never boils, and ultimately cools completely. Teresa does let her guard down a few times, most notably while in prison with Patty, who will become her partner. The Patty moments were really the most engaging part of the novel for me, and as her role decayed, my interest decayed as well. It doesn't help that all the drama culminates in the standard gunfight that ended like 90% of the action films in the 1980's. Maybe this too is intentional. Throughout the book, many tales of criminals' past are recounted in song while our heroine sips her tequila. The implication that the very tale we are reading is a type of tall tale meant for one of these bar songs is far from hidden, yet while this may explain the reason for her elusive and fantastical rise from illiterate girlfriend to 'queen', it doesn't make it any more interesting.

On an alternate topic, I must reveal that I did not read this in its original language, but in English. Please, someone correct me if I am wrong, but my assumption is that the translation is terrible, and bears a lot of the burden of my negative experience here. Por Ejemplo - - sorry; for example: large swathes of dialogue - both external and internal - are in spanish, the majority of it being profanity. The effect of this is the same as a bad movie where the german soldiers all speak english with bad german accents except when they yell 'schnell' at someone. Here's a line: "The hijo de la chingada had a mother." Okay, so here's my question... the translator had to choose to leave the subject of this sentence in Spanish, right? I don't have a copy of the Spanish text, but I find it hard to believe that all the Spanish text in this English version is somehow indicated as needing to remain in Spanish for a translation. Regardless, the result is silly.

All criticism aside, it kept my interest for the most part. There are a few good introspective moments, some great passages, and like I said in the beginning, a decent story. A good thorough edit and a translator that just translated , could have made all the difference in the world.
3431666
The story just plods along. Trying to stick with it. will amend my review after I finish reading this story
360229
I got this book from Amazon as a bargain-priced eBook. I hadn't read a Grisham book in a long time, but I remembered the swift pace of his storytelling. Well, he is still a good storyteller, but what I didn't remember was that he was such a pedestrian writer. Some of his paragraphs were embarrassingly awkward, and if it had been a print book I was reading, I might have taken a red pencil to the text. I see that this is the second Jake Brigance story and he did make a number of inside allusions to an earlier story but I would certainly not rush out to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Jake.
Bottom line: If you have time to waste, this will fill the bill.
925460
Story is told too quickly. Anyone, but especially kids, need to be lulled to sleep softly and sloiwly.
18572
The story itself is not the problem here, rather it is how the story is decorated that fails. It seems to me that the author has read too much of the pantheon of disaffected preppy authors: Irving, Cheever, and Auchincloss (as have I). Unfortunately she seems to miss the subtlety of these stories in this, I assume, her ode to them. As one reviewer correctly pointed out, the characters in the story live on the Vineyard, but they are certainly not island folk. In fact much of the settings (Exeter, Brown, Groton, Martha's Vineyard, etc..) seem more like an exercise in name dropping rather than important elements in plot development. This story could have been set anywhere and told the same story. If your hoping for a better understanding of the noblesse malaise then this is not the book for you.
647153
Change Agent is less of a story and more a voyeuristic trip through the underworld of a plausible near future. Listeners who are satisfied experiencing the very well thought out semi-dystopian future will have a lot to like. It is for this reason I gave the book 3 stars instead of 2. However, those like myself who want a more coherent story, and notice the numerous flaws of the main character will find it tough to get through.

A fundamental problem with Change Agent is it doesn't know the scope of the story it wants to tell. It is clear that most of the effort went into building the world, yet that world is mostly static throughout the book. It is only there to be viewed and is incapable of driving the story forward. Thus it is left to the main character, Kenneth Durand, to provide the fuel to tell a compelling narrative. This is his personal story. It is not an epic tale about a world or society. Unfortunately it is the world, not Durand, that is most developed.

Simply put, Durand is hypocritical, unethical, reckless, selfish, and acts like an old man yelling at these new fangled computer doohickies. To be clear the story doesn't intend for him to come across this way, and on first look he isn't. It is only when you think a little harder about the actions he takes and their outcomes that it becomes apparent. That colors the rest of the story from that moment forward. It also needs to be noted that Durand's motivation and plan (what little there is) throughout the book makes little to no sense.

==== Very mild spoilers below ====

I've kept this review spoiler free up to this point but now will provide very mild general examples to back up some of the claims made about the traits of the main character.

* Hypocritical: He intends to do the same thing (genetic modification for personal gains) he keeps arguing against
* Unethical: He withholds vital info from police to pursue his goals. This is information that would be lost in the very likely event he got killed.
* Reckless: Has no way to achieve his goals. He lucks through the story. He basically wants the people trying to kill him to help him out.
* Selfish: He is willing to get other people killed to further his own goals.

Ultimately Durand is a groan inducing character (I literally did this). He continually acts holier than thou, but his entire motivation is that he can't take the way he looks. He is willing to likely get himself killed and deprive his daughter of a father growing up just on the improbable chance to get his original body back. So much for thinking a person is more than their appearance.

To the book's credit, it is self aware enough to point out some of these issues, but it does absolutely nothing to resolve them. When confronted, Durand simply gets upset and forcefully says yet again he must get his body back.
3237473
Whitey BGulger's story is fascinating, however, this book is written from a journalistic point of view and includes lots of overlapping and repeated time frames and events.  I found it hard to keep track of the time line and the meat of the story.  This book reads like revised newspaper articles that may have referred to events from some time ago rather than an engaging narrative.  So, for me, the story got lost frequently in the snippets of information that came out in the news jumping back and forth.  Factual, yes.  Engaging page turner, no.  Having written over 200 business cases, I understand the challenge of interviewing people post facto and then trying to assemble and tell the story.
2754848
I appreciate the author's attempt of telling stories within stories. But the jumpiness makes me lose interest in any of the characters that I must become one with in order to get into the stories. There is a lot of telling, not much showing. There isn't much to the plot (or plots) that would keep me curious or on edge. Rather, we jump from one thing and event to another thing and event--episodic, as evidenced by 53 chapters for 91 pages.

The book needs focus on one or two villainous villains and heroic heroes, such as in the Harry Potter series or the time-proven Narnia books. I wish the author well in developing this series.
4436447
Too long.  Story could have been conveyed in 2 hours.
1899139
An attempt to continue a story that has been proven a lie from start to finish.
4284387
I strongly object the simplicity of the story. Having a good story it lacks deepness.

Also, I'm retired but travel a lot and many times to the Southern US, the wording is incorrect. The "phonetic" is as important as a Landmark or Agency (FBI, etc) with strict codes.

Jenkins is a bonafide retired crime investigator from New York adapting to a different place environment, "little town, fish out".

As he returns to active duty his sense of what is wrong or right are very deep in the story. That save the story a lot. 3 stars
4744736
It is difficult to justify the waste of time to write a review of this story. It is little more than a newer version of an older theme, just not as well written. Alice in Wonderland (Alice through the Looking Glass), and The Wizard of Oz both had the protagonist experiencing something that put them in a different time/location. The primary difference in the two older versions is the lack of pornography. Alice didn't have an affair with the white rabbit, and Dorothy didn't have sex with the lion, scarecrow, and tin woodman. The author's reference to the sexual exploits of the Geisha, and historical references to Scots history indicate that while she may have done some research, she didn't bother to pay attention. The Scots brogue is difficult for any but a Scot to understand when spoken. The author's inconsistent use of attempts to urilize that language indicates she made up her own version. Mellville's Moby Dick is over 600 pages of redundancies with little to move the plot. That story could have been told in 50 pages or less and been a fascinating read. This author's digression to meaningless detail drags the story to a boring halt. Other reviewer's comments summed up The Outlander in fewer words and were far better written. I take objection to the overuse of pornography for its own sake. Maybe there is something later in the story to justify its existence. I was unwilling to waste the time to find out.  For me, there are far more useful ways to spend my time.
1083847
To begin with, I understand the comparisons with Ruff to authors like Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. Each of these latter authors encompass a very particular American postmodern literary idiom, first seen in the 1950's and still present today in the work of authors like David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann. Like these authors, Ruff's voice is verbose (and I don't mean that in a negative way) and eccentric, his plots expansive and multi-layered. However, unlike all the authors mentioned above, Ruff's book fails to carry the burden of a convoluted plot and a hyperactive narrative style. More importantly, though, it also fails to convince me that there is any real meaning behind this character parade.

Not helping are Ruff's tired and unsophisticated ideas. Talking about androids might have been brilliant and intriguing when Philip K. Dick was doing it in the late sixties; writing about them in the early nineties (when I assume Ruff was composing this mess), is not. So, too, with the inclusion of Ayn Rand, Herbert Hoover, and Walt Disney in the story. With the latter, Ruff seems giddy to relate all the new biographical information he has just learned about Disney and  rather sanctimoniously supposes we haven't already read about; yet, fails to make this information mean anything to his plot or what we must suppose is the overall cultural critique presented to us.

With the characters of Rand and Hoover, on the other hand, what we have is an author using historical figures as characters that, without the ability to "talk back," become victims of Ruff's critical intent. Authors do this all the time--create characters merely as springboards off which to bounce their ideas, or airborne targets which they can shoot down without fear of rebuttal. Ruff's problem is that by using such public and infamous personages as these--characters that already carry enough cultural stigma to carry novels all by themselves--their fictional victimization becomes too obvious, too contrived, and so literarily presumptuous as to be only conceivable from the pen of a freshman in first-year workshop.

Lastly, what of the plot? The question I kept asking myself is: what does it matter? What do the stories of Lexa and Philo and Harry Gant matter? What are they pointing us toward? Why all the mention of American history and cultural nostalgia and why this ridiculous plot that involves painted submarines and lemurs? And why is this supposed to be funny? Why indeed! Beneath the surface, this novel is not a satire of popular, political, philosophical, or even aesthetic America culture despite the constant riffing off "American" themes like capitalism, technology, and war. Instead, it is a long, confusing, and boring quasi-sci-fi, quasi-comedic novel about nothing at all. And that's not clever: that's just a waste of time and paper.

I wasted two weeks reading this book and feel like contacting Grove Press and asking them to explain just why they would publish such a amateurish joke of a book.
1503796
story drags, felt like I was talking to someone who rambles
3284296
This is a reasonable effort at a story, but the research is shoddy, at least when it comes to historical perspective.  The author has his hero fighting the
HUK's in the Philippine Islands prior to the war - a rebellion that has its origin in Communist guerrilla actions against the Japanese starting in 1942 and didn't evolve into a pure insurrection until 1946.  That set a tone of suspicion about other facts and when that is added to the irritating insistence on overuse of what the author apparently believes is the way all English troops/upper class folks used in day to day conversations, almost a PG Woodhouse use of slang, it detracts from what could have been a good read.
3352342
What should be an excellent story is deminished by writing that lacks an active voice. The generic scenes and telling pulled me out of the story. At one point the writer describes the riots in the outer sector, but it sounds generic as the action is reduced to a few descriptive lines. The author kills the action and tension with far too many descriptive sentences about feelings. That she can show in the narrative. Disappointing, because I could see this being popular. Diction and syntax needs work.