Compelling read, but has its problems
920059
Vampire Ajax Rasmussen drags an archaeologist and former police detective to his town and gives them random clues to who and what he is and what he plans to do in the form of dead bodies. The detective follows his leads and the archaeologist unravels the clues from the past. Their sleuthing eventually leads them to an inevitable showdown where the vampire expects to win.

The story is compelling as are the main characters, though it could benefit from editing and some judicious page cutting. The villain's motivation for tainting the blood supply needed some definition as well. Should the author choose to do this, the book could go from just okay to really good!

Overall, though, this story was interesting enough to read to the end, which was wrapped up nicely.

If you're looking for an atypical vampire story with a bit of detective/mystery thrown in for good measure, then this book is definitely worth the 99-cent price.
2164154
While other reviewers seem to either love or hate this book, I'm torn right in the middle.  This book takes a lot of effort to read, both in terms of length (827 p), and the mental energy required to keep up with the convoluted, decade jumping, incongruous intertwining of the characters and sub plots.  At one level, the prose is masterfully crafted.  The author succeeds in capturing the essence of the various scenes, cultural context, and zeitgeist of the eras and locations represented.  On the other hand, I found character development disappointing.  I still don't know what makes the primary character (Nick) tick.
The first third of this book is engaging, with the promise of interesting characters and plots. The prologue around the historic 1951 Bobby Thompson home run ball hints at becoming the major reoccurring theme of the book, but other than Nick becoming the eventual owner, the theme trails away.  The same can be said about the appearance of J. Edgar Hoover, who, other than sharing his name with another non-related character, seems to appear only for cultural context.  The middle section becomes very muddled, introducing additional characters and situations that keep multiplying, some with little or no apparent connection to the main themes (such as they are).  The final chapter is somewhat redeeming, however I found the analogy of the Internet as Heaven for a deceased nun a bit of a stretch.  While we finally get some closure to Nick's odyssey, most of the other characters and subplots remain unresolved enigmas.
Overall, 3 of 5 stars for stunning prose and the author's ability to convey the cultural nuances spanning five decades and multiple geographic settings.
315753
I have a difficult time rating this book because the story is quite interesting and involving, but has several flaws. The details of life in post-WWII England are fascinating, especially as one comes to realize how the war years and subsequent hardships affected people's characters in different ways. Having come from the comparatively affluent U.S., the protagonist, "Rusty," understandably has problems adjusting to her new life. Especially telling is the moment when Rusty realizes that by being sent away, she not only escaped the horrors of war but missed something very important and life-changing that happened to the English people. However, though the author obviously meant Rusty to be a character her readers would identify and sympathize with, I found her frustratingly, unbelievably stupid at times. For example, any normally intelligent 12-year-old would have known enough to keep her mouth shut about events that her prim and proper but domineering grandmother would not approve of and which would get herself and her mother in trouble, but Rusty blurts it all out. After a year, she has made no headway in adjusting to her boarding school, and she has no tact and no  ability to deal with different people in different ways. Rusty's father is also unbelievable: a caricature of a hard-line, unfeeling, unloving military man, yet inexplicably still in submission to his mother. Throughout the book I objected to the implications that modesty and privacy are  old-fashioned (there is a scene in which post-pubertal girls are running around outside naked and this is supposed to be cute; Rusty's Amerian family is in the habit of celebrating each girl's first period with a family party but the stuffy Victorian English can't discuss such things openly), to the portrayal of Americans as Bohemians who let their children do whatever they want, and the author's anti-school attitude (Rusty's college-prep school represses children and fosters bullying; in what is meant to be a happy ending, she ends up in a "progressive" school where the children don't even have to attend classes unless they want to). There is enough going on throughout this rather long book to keep interest up and I have read it several times, but I would hesitate to recommend it to its actual target age group. As a parent, I might read this book with my, say, 12 to 15-year-old daughter, but we would definitely discuss some of the anti-intellectual and morally questionable attitudes which the author takes for granted.
1022303
I like to work logic puzzles and I love a good plot-filled mystery with lots of surprises, and this one had them in abundance.  And the city of Paris in general and the Louvre museum in particular are made to order for heart-pounding thrillers, and this book is no exception.  The symbolism is wildly fascinating,the characterizations are good, the pace is fast, and the twists and turns of the plot kept me on the edge of my seat.
However, I had two problems with the book -- or maybe I can say ONE objection with two aspects, and each objection cost it one star in my evaluation.
1.  There are a lot of historical "facts" given here that challenge the teachings of Orthodox Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant).  I won't go into detail about them here, but I'll say this:  I wish the author had given some good, solid sources so that we, the readers, could have checked on the sources ourselves.  One of the characters in the story states that many "respected" historian-scholars could corroborate the view about the "real" meaning of the Holy Grail and the "real" history of Christ.  I would have liked to know who they were.  I also would like to have known if the story's take on the life of Christ, the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail legend was an honest-to-goodness historical view or one invented by the author for the story's purpose.
2.  I also felt like the author was "blaming" Christianity for the bad treatment of women.  Maybe he wasn't, and I misunderstood him.  But I feel it is important to mention that the church did not invent the bad treatment of women.  This is important to know, because while the church(both Catholic and Protestant) has left a lot to be desired in its treatment of women, the view of women as inferiors (which is unBiblical, by the way) was in existence long before the church ever came into being.
Anyone who has studied Western Civilization and/or Far Eastern history will know that ancient cultures, many of whom had a plethora of female deities, still treated their women like dirt.  The ancient Greeks held women in contempt -- just read Aristotle, who lived before Christ. Ancient and not-so-ancient India and China have historically mopped up the floor with women, female deities in their culture notwithstanding.
I know what an extreme patriarchal mindset some churches have -- as a woman I have been on the receiving end of it.  But let's not blame Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular for causing it.  Misogyny is extremely ancient!
The book is worth reading, but before taking any of its claims as truly historical, it behooves us all to check out our facts!
1561601
The all-too-realistic context of India-Pakistan wars, Hindu-Muslim gangs and a stark portrayal of a dystopian/anarchist society should make for a compelling narrative. In fact, for the most part of the novel, Suri manages to just do that. The use of two narrators - with undeniably different views and styles - adds to the evolution of the plot. When the author takes a few unnecessary detours, the book starts reading like an amateur sex diary -  adding very minimal value towards the character or plot development.  Nevertheless, the vivid imagery, the imaginative (yet grounded in realistic fears that have pervaded discussions in the subcontinent for ages) extrapolations and a not-so-subtle dig at gender and religious stereotypes make this a good read.
2565337
I've just finished reading A Criminal Defense, and must agree with many of the five-star reviewer comments.  It is a compelling read, especially for those who enjoy legal/police procedurals, and well worth reading. I give it 3 stars for one reason ( without giving away the storyline): the line between moral and ethical behavior in all walks of life is one that shifts with the facts.  The legal line between innocence and guilt is much less flexible, though facts are subject to interpretation by a courtroom jury. And that line is what determines whether or not we live in a just and fair society. This narrative conflates these ideas, which makes the book interesting.  Nevertheless, I was unsatisfied with the outcome of the story -- the only price paid for criminal behavior was lifelong personal guilt, and that, I believe, does not bring justice to the victim, regardless of her enmity. How does one survive such guilt? Does the outcome justify the means of winning it?
2849823
While the plot is well-paced, the subject matter of child sexual abuse, pornography and kidnapping makes it a difficult book to really like. Still, if you can stomach the difficult subject matter, the book is well written. The only caveat to that is a spectral disturbance at a very dramatic moment that is out of place with the rest of the book. And the worse part is that it is totally unnecessary. The narrator of the book changes frequently from one character to another, and it is not until deep in the book that one can be sure which of the male characters are speaking, and while I found it interesting, others might find it irritating. One thing that I did like was that not every clue panned out. Some at first looked promising but didn't yield much. That seems more like reality to me, but on the whole, the book could have done with a bit less reality.
4145452
Compelling and distancing at the same time, the book mimics the story of the main character, Guy, a career diplomat now retired who was once active in the french resistance. It's difficult to chart the development of Guy's almost numb approach to life and relationships, but clearly the guy is unable to connect with anyone including himself.  His double life could refer to his inability to acknowledge and act on his homosexual feelings; or his marriage to two women that he can never really love; or his inability even to know who he himself is (this is played out in the many different names he adopts, the meta thinking that goes on as he watches himself and even as he writes his memoirs and tries to track not only the events that shaped his life but his reaction to them.

What is especially powerful is Raphael's ability to project a wrenching emotional angst within Guy even as Guy acts and professes an emotional nonchalance, an anti-emotion if you will.  It's almost as if those things that are supposed to make people feel good, Guy interprets in his own life as errors or evidence of his faults and those that are bad, he interprets as his true self. Yet, he can't reconcile why it is that he does "good" or "moral" actions, such as standing up when his friend is taken off by the Nazi's, not killing a man who he believes is not part of the Nazi's, etc., unless he can interpret them as somehow weaknesses of character, which he has plenty of as well (seeking out prostitutes to somehow prove he is a man; developing an intentionally adversarial relationship with his first wife Bertha).  Yet, there are these glimpses of a man who would have been different if there had been any way to be so.  Perhaps part of the underlying tension of the novel comes from the reader wondering why is it that he can't ever be himself?  Is it the social ostracism around being gay?  Is it the strange relationship his parents and uncle have?

The biggest weakness from my perspective was the long mental digressions as Guy or another character ponders a moral dilemma or a psychological interpretation. These go on too long and just aren't realistic. It's like philosophy underlying the plot, and it got to be too much for me.  There are interesting things said in these digressions, but it just seems like they should be in a philosophy book.  So, maybe the book's double life is also this tension between the human being and the philosophical/psychological metathinking about the human being?

The book is told in leaps forwards and backwards so you have to keep track of characters and their names (Fritz, first love who is taken by Gestapo; Felix second possible love who services Germans in the furthering of resistance ends, David and his family that serves as all Guy could want to be but who abandon him and he can never understand why, Maureen and Berthe, his wives; the prostitutes, including Pia who he finds almost dead and does nothing to help, his family; his two sons, one of whom is also named David; his uncle). You have to keep track of places (the attic he is stashed after he stands up for Fritz and where he meets Felix), David's home (where he becomes active in the resistance), rome (where he lives with Berthe), his family home where he lives as a child and then later with Maureen, etc.  And Raphael moves fluidly between these places and the current era, where Guy is recording his memoirs.

It's a good read, but it's long, dense and ultimately wrenching, as it raises questions about what it means to like yourself and how not liking who you are projects to all of those around you; questions about morality, survival, and doing what is right.
2123087
The book is well written, there is no doubt about Dorit Rabinyat writing skills. The problem is, the reader knows the end from page 1 and that because Liat, the main role, doesn't believe for one second that her love story might have a chance. The Israel-Palestine conflict is, one more time, depicted in terms of good and bad; what could be a new approach is the fact that the conflict exists, first and foremost, in the mind of Liat, the main role, and because she is "conflict-shaped", things could never have been another way. It makes the reader wonder "what if she wouldn't have been confict-shaped? Would things have been different?". The book is entertaining, with some powerful paragraphs, the one about Himli gardening at his new house, it's full of lyrism, colors and smells, for instance. The description of the cold, snow and horrible New York's winter get's tiresome, it seems that the winter lasts for years instead of months, even if the intention could have been to emphasize the hardness of it on two people coming from a warm weather. This said: it's a good book, worth reading it once, but not twice.
4096513
This book was a captivating read, with a plot full of well-formed and detailed characters. It was easy to get lost in and the idea of the book is very creative. However, I have some problems with it.
1. Word errors. There/their/they're and the like were misused sometimes.
2. Even though they are defended, this presents being gay as being a fool.
3. Swearing, if sporadic.
169385
Sterling has an impressive imagination. He's created a rich, complex, and intriguing universe occupied by a range of so-called `posthumans', chief of whom are the Shapers and Mechanists. These two groups have opposing philosophies and are in conflict with one another throughout these stories. This is reflected in the work, which is heavier on both personal and political machination than on story. There's nothing wrong with that except Sterling sometimes fails to keep the reader sufficiently informed. Clearly he had a clear history of this universe in his head while writing. But the reader does not, and the convoluted nature of the feuding and intrigue can be somewhat impenetrable at times. Compounded with Sterling's often dense, overwritten prose, this detracts from what could have be been an excellent body of work. It's still a good read though and deserves 3.5 stars.
478553
I really puzzled over what rating to give this book.  Im listening to it on Audible, and it certainly is a compelling story.  Imagine Little House on the Prairie if Pa was a raving lunatic, Ma was a mindless Stepford replicant and Mary was a homicidal maniac.  As a novel, it is jaw dropping and fascinating.

However, as a nonfiction memoir, I have some problems with it.

We are asked to believe that, with zero education (except she somehow learned how to read), and on the strength of having read nothing but the Bible and the Book of Mormon and few ACT workbooks, the author somehow gets into BYU with a high enough score to get an enormous scholarship, graduates magna, breezes into Cambridge for her PhD, then floats over to Harvard.  There are thousands, if not millions, of brilliant people who go to the best schools, study hard for a decade and more and cant manage one, much less all, of those achievements.  And yet the author just came down from the junkyard in Nowhere, Idaho and doors were flung open for her.

Thats some kind of luck.  Or angels or something.

The luck seems to extend to her superhero body that recovers from being impaled on scrap metal, a broken back and possibly neck, an arm and wrist repeatedly broken by her brother and numerous other physical catastrophes that would have killed or maimed anyone else.  Yet, two weeks in bed seems to be the cure for everything.

I would recommend this book as a lively and entertaining read, but my spidey sense tells me there is going to be some debunking in the near future and we may be looking at the next James Frey.
1266385
The descriptions of the failings of Detroit are often quite good and compelling. The book is leavened with much personal detail, most of which I could have done without (one almost gets the impression the author is trying to establish his cred with the lower class by laying it out; I don't think it adds much though). I find it somewhat amusing that someone with such an eye for detail can overlook the the most obvous, glaring issue behind all these problems. It seems to be self-willed blindness. Sure, he trots out the standard litany of factors behind Detroit's downfall. But he can't even consider the the most obvious. As an autopsy, it fails miserably.
2559337
Incendiary is in the form of a lengthy letter to Osama Bin Laden by the woman whose son and husband were recently killed in a major terrorist attack.  This sort of set-up often comes across as a bit forced or clumsy, and it does here as well at various points. The start for one, but one's resignations about the form are quickly set aside once the narrator, Petal, starts to recount the day of the actual attack--how she learned of it while having sex with neighbor, her attempts to get to the site, the physical and emotional aftermath once she arrives.  This and what comes right afterward holds the attention for a while, but as the book goes on, the clumsiness of the premise begins to feel more and more noticeable.

  Other problems start to arise as well.  For one, Petal's voice struck me as wildly inconsistent.  A lower-middle class women, at times she speaks in wonderfully true to life mode, capturing the bemusement, anger, sarcasm, self-doubt in just the right language and her sharp moments of grief pepper the book with brilliantly captured pain, but at other times the language comes across as more artificial, overly poetic, too ironically self-aware.  And, painfully, too didactic at times.

  The side-plots involving romance, class consciousness (too broadly done), and then her work with the police and what she finds out  there (too implausible) weaken the book, untethering it from the strongest points--a mother's grief and a city's response.

  The characters veer too often toward caricature, especially the upper class ones, or flatness, to overcome problems of plot and while Petal's grieving voice reminds us periodically of the book's potential, in the end it has traveled too far from its core strength.  Not a bad book, but a disappointing one.
2715760
Coming from a similar background as Vance - the mountains of North Carolina - and having been around some of the same sorts of people and experienced a similar culture I was struck by inconsistencies in this book.
Vance writes well and tells a compelling tale but at times it's too cute by half and seems designed to elicit specific reactions while quite subtly promoting a particular ideology. I finished this book wondering of anyone has fact checked the book. There are elements that simply don't ring true are are very inconsistent. For example, only a few pages after discussing how the Marine Corps taught him financial responsibility and awareness of personal health Vance relates a narrative of complete unawareness of those lessons while at Ohio State. It's not a sequence of someone forgetting what he learned and coming to that realization. Rather it is a discussion of his pride in learning personal responsibility followed by examples that totally betray that.
There are other times where Vance discusses his academic performance that are simply inconsistent with events. It's as if he's painting the darkest picture possible in order to contrast it with a brilliant Horatio Alger moment.

There are some keen insights in this book but I was left with the impression that Vance was trying just a bit too hard to make some very specific points. Parts of this read more as a romanticized fiction, they simply don't ring true. I really would like to give this book four stars but I have the gnawing feeling that it is really less than it appears.
3710062
The events surrounding the Castel Di Sangro soccer team are undeniably compelling; sadly the writing does not always equal the story it tells.  The book is quite slow in some sections, and the hyperbolic descriptions of events large and small makes it difficult to distinguish between the two.  Additionally, though he admits at the beginning that he knows very little about soccer, McGinniss spends a great deal of time criticizing the tactics of the team's coach and the management of the club.  The impression he leaves is one of an overbearing, know-it-all American whose actions are inappropriate to his setting.  The sanctimonious tone with which McGinniss concludes the book misses an opportunity to truly discuss the complex issues surrounding the team's final game and instead ends up as a vitriolic rant by the author.  It is not that the coach and club do not deserve criticism, but rather that McGinniss seems particularly poorly placed to give it. He forgets that he does not truly understand either the game or the team, to the detriment of the book.
4356598
This could be a very good book but it needs a firm editor. The book has likable characters, complex plotting, a good mystery and some action for those who like that sort of thing. However, it needs tightening as well as the contradictory elements straightened out, misused words corrected, focus, and an ending. It wanders and loses what cohension it started with. That said, it is difficult to put down and interesting most of the way through. I recommend it, with reservations.