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A Protagonist You Hate to Like

Évalué le: 2020-05-30

In The Hunger Games, Coriolanus Snow was evil incarnate ... he was the living, breathing embodiment of what was really bad about Panem, a grise eminence who based all of his decisions on what was good for himself, and only secondarily good for his nearest and dearest, and just not giving a damn for anyone else at all. He was a powerful parasite who was destined to go to hell, but in the meantime would never take his hand off the tiller. So why on earth would we want to read his origin story ... surely he sprang from the womb exactly as he died, with poison on his lips and in his treacherous heart. Well, as this book sets out, that presumption was sorta kinda right ... and wrong. But this says more about us than it does about Snow. We want to like him. We want him to make the right decisions. We admire his cunning and his logic and, most of all, his dumb luck What's wrong with us that we can kinda like this snake? That we are sorta rooting for him. That somehow he doesn't turn out to be so loathsome? I think we've been Snowed! If you've every read the Ripley books by Patricia Highsmith or Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, you have met Snow. So suspend your belief in goodness, step off your moral high ground, and try to enjoy the ride. My final critique is -- read it, love it or hate it, and then take a shower to clean off all the slime. A couple of nits about the book -- I never, ever got that Lucy Grey was anything other then boring. Grey was a pretty good name for her, as there was no real spark ... it was all lip service, with very little depth. Maybe it was that she was being seen through the egoist Snow's eyes, but then why did he fall so hard for her? Anyway, I preferred Maude Ivory. And the narrator was very underwhelming and disappointing. All of his females sounded like mush-mouthed morons, and the men were very one-note. I couldn't tell if it was Snow or Sejanus talking half the time. So a very reserved thumbs up on this one.

Awful ... don't waste your credit or your money

Évalué le: 2020-01-13

A wish fulfillment for hard core preppers ... no believable characters ... just a joke.

Definitely not up to Rhys's usual standard!

Évalué le: 2020-01-09

This whole novel sounds rushed and poorly planned out. And all the characters were so one note that they all ran together in my head. So re-read the earlier books and wait for the next one ... don't bother with this one.

Great story, but lose the Circumlocution!

Évalué le: 2019-11-05

I love zombie books and anything to do with the end of the world, and this is a pretty darned good entry into both. It's got a good narrator, a cracking good story and the characters are terrific -- but it reaches a point that our intrepid author's ineptitude in using big words becomes downright laughable. At some points the verbiage is so tortuous and so woefully misguided, that for me it stopped the narrative cold. Somebody should tell Mr. Tufo that when something is penultimate, it is the second to last occurrence of something, not a last occurrence that is somehow better than ultimate. And does it have to be a visage every single time? What's wrong with just talking about someone's face? So my suggestion to Mr. Tufo is, throw away the thesaurus, and use everyday words that blend in with the story to help it along. Stop trying to impress with English Lit 1.0 blather. In short, get an editor!

Did not like the main character.

Évalué le: 2019-07-20

I think this story would have been improved if the story was told by an omniscient narrator. Then we might have had a more 360 degree view of things instead of Shelby's self-centered tunnel vision The only character I really wanted to get to know was Tom, but he didn't seem to exist outside Shelby's sensibilities. I almost envied him losing his grasp on reality because what was going on inside his head had to be more interesting than what I was reading on the page. This is one of those books where everything and everyone seems to be in a ten-foot square social bubble. The only characters at all in this small town are involved in the drama somehow or other, and there's not so much as a shopkeeper or bus driver to give the place any colour. I was underwhelmed with the story itself and when it became really far-fetched towards the end, I totally lost interest. I read through to the end, but by that time it was just meh.

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Good story, bad writing

Évalué le: 2019-05-20

This was a pretty good story written by a pretty poor wordsmith. And although the characters were well drawn I didn't really like anyone but Johnny. I was singularly unimpressed with the actual writing ... when the only adjective or adverb used is f*** it is so egregious that its shock value is totally muted and the going becomes just plain tedious. Use your imagination and our marvellous English language to draw a picture, to define a character, to flesh out a situation ... that will give us something worth reading! In other words, work on the craft!

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